Judge Dennis Davis
The Magic of Leonard Bernstein

Judge Dennis Davis | The Magic of Leonard Bernstein | 02.27.24

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

Well, good evening or good afternoon to everybody. This lecture is really a pleasure to give because Leonard Bernstein is certainly one of my great heroes, and I suspect, unlike the last lecture, where I had to negotiate the contours of the International Court of Justice, this lecture, hopefully, will give everybody a great deal of joy and light rather than heat. I’m not going to, as it were, talk a lot about the film “Maestro.” Of course, as some people have suggested to me, it was appropriate to have a lecture on Leonard Bernstein in the light of “Maestro.” I’ve already done one lecture some while back, and I suspect that if you go to the archives, you’ll find it, and I’ve deliberately tried to do different clips this time for some reasons I’ll advance a little later, but it is interesting to me that if you look at “Maestro,” of course, it focuses on Bernstein’s marriage to the Costa Rican actress Felicia Montealegre, who was born in 1922, died in ‘78. Bernstein, of course, born in 1918, died in 1990, astonishingly, only 72 years old, which, given my age at the moment, which is exactly that, I find that’s extraordinarily young.

A 26-year marriage, which began in 1951, produced three children, was, of course, not exactly anything other than a turbulent affair, partly because, as the movie suggests, and as we all know, Bernstein was bisexual, at the very least, and some say, such as those who worked with him on “West Side Story,” he was a gay man who got married. “He wasn’t conflicted about it. "He was just gay,” said one of the people who worked with him. He had many affairs, some that his wife knew about; some that she didn’t. Sexuality was known to her at the outset. Indeed, in the film, Carey Mulligan says, “I know exactly who you are. "Let’s give it a whirl.” I’m not going to say much more about the film because it seems to me that it’s focused on a marriage, and that doesn’t capture Bernstein at all. It just doesn’t.

In fact, I find it extraordinarily difficult to capture him in more to the 45, 50-minute lecture. Just let’s consider the basic facts, if we could start. He’s born in 1918 to, obviously, a Jewish family. His father had a hair and beauty salon business. Indeed, Bernstein’s father wanted Bernstein to be part of the business, and it is apparently said that in 1943, which I’ll come back to, when he got his big break, standing in at short notice for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra when Bruno Walter had taken ill. At the end, Bernstein’s father was asked how he could have considered not encouraging his son to be a musician, to which, apparently, he answered, in such a Jewish (indistinct), “That I know that my son "was going to grow up to be Leonard Bernstein,” but he, Bernstein, as I say, was born in 1918.

He studied at Harvard University, at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He studied conducting at the Tanglewood Summer School, hugely influenced, as he acknowledged time and time again, by somebody who makes a short appearance in “Maestro,” which was Serge Koussevitzky, and he actually became his assistant later on. As I’ve indicated, in '43, he stands in, at short notice, for Bruno Walter, who was a legendary conductor and, of course, had been a student of Gustav Mahler, about more a little later in this lecture, and then, by '58, he becomes the music director of the Philharmonic, the first American-born musician to hold the post. The 11 seasons in which he was the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic transformed him into, really, an iconic figure within the city.

After he stood down, he remained a regular visitor in the orchestra. He was given the title of laureate conductor. By then, he had established himself with many of the major orchestras around the world, particularly forging close relationships with the Israel Philharmonic, about which more, again, a little later in this lecture, the London Symphony, and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, about which I also need to say a little bit more later. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it was, most people said, the obvious choice to conduct the celebratory performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was Bernstein. There’s no question that he’s had a very extensive repertoire based on the romantic period, ranged from the classical, however, to his own time, championing many American composers.

In my lecture on Aaron Copland, I mentioned his relationship with Bernstein there, and it was an important one. He was certainly a great exponent of Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, and above all, and again, I’ll have to come back to this, Gustav Mahler. He was, in addition to being a great conductor, of course, an extraordinary teacher, and two of the clips that I’m going to show you now reflect on that. In the first place, he was a much-admired presenter of televised Young People’s Concerts. In fact, I think, if I’m right, he had 53 of these over the period of his career, and they were really quite remarkable in the sense that they sort of captured his ability to explain music in the most simple and I would’ve thought clear fashion to young people. Let me start, then, by playing you a short five-minute clip of one of the famous concerts that Bernstein conducted for children at Carnegie Hall in the 1950s. Could we have clip 1?

[Clip plays]

• [Announcer] Carnegie Hall in New York City, the home of the world’s greatest musical events. Today’s event is one in a series of New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts under the musical direction of Leonard Bernstein. And here is Mr. Bernstein.

• [Person] Give me that spray, behind you, the spray. Oh, there’s no time? No time?

• Okay, now what do you think that music’s all about? Can you tell me? That’s just what I thought you’d say: cowboys, bandits, horses, the Wild West. I know my little daughter, Jamie, who’s five years old and who’s sitting up there agrees with you. When she heard me play this piece, she said, “Oh, the Lone Ranger song. "Hi-Yo, Silver!” Well, I hate to disappoint her, and you too, but it really isn’t about the Lone Ranger at all. It’s about notes: E-flats and F-sharps. You see, no matter how many times people tell you stories about what music means, forget them. Stories aren’t what music means at all. Music is never about anything. Music just is. Music is notes, beautiful notes and songs put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening to them. That’s all there is to it, and when we ask, “What does it mean? "What does this piece of music mean?” then we’re asking a very hard question, and that’s the question we’re going to try to answer today. Now, it’s a funny thing about this meaning business, in music, anyway. When you say, “What does it mean?” what you’re really saying is, “What is it trying to tell you? "What ideas does it make me have?”

Just like words. When you hear words, you get ideas from them. If I say to you, “Oh, I burned my finger,” then immediately, you get an idea from what I said, or some ideas. You get the idea that I burned my finger, that it hurts, that I might not be able to play the piano anymore, or that I have a loud, ugly voice when I scream, lots of different ideas like that. That’s words, but if I play you notes, just notes on the piano like that, those notes don’t tell you any ideas. Those notes aren’t about burning your finger or Sputniks or lampshades or rockets or any… Well, what are they about? They’re about music. For instance, take this piece by Chopin. Beautiful, isn’t it? But what’s it about? Nothing. Or take this Beethoven sonata. That’s not about anything either. Or take this piece of boogie-woogie. It’s not about anything either.

[Clip ends]

• At the end of… Sorry, that’s… It’s an extended clip that I just, for the sake of time, just wanted to give you a feel of how he tried to explain music to small children and the remarkable thing, just how, just seeing their faces just light up. Last time I played him explaining Mahler’s 4, equally extraordinary, and the point about what music’s about is something that he explained to these children who came to his morning concerts, but he also did so for a very sophisticated audience. In 1973, Bernstein gave a series of six lectures at Harvard University, the Norton Lectures. I should say I’m very proud of the fact 'cause I’m South African, that a great series of Norton Lectures, and maybe comparable to Bernstein’s, were given in 2012 by the great South African artist, William Kentridge, which I can highly recommend to everybody, but that’s not my beat this evening.

Bernstein’s lectures in '73 were called “The Unanswered Question,” and what he sought to do was to explain the language of music, if I could put it that way, to his audience. It was a specialist audience, and they were extraordinarily sophisticated lectures. You can get them all, I think, on YouTube. They are really remarkable. I’ve had the great pleasure of putting them in my motorcar when I was acting at the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein. Had to drive up the 600 miles there and listen to them, or they’re really quite extraordinary, so what I want to play for you is what are called the five greatest minutes of musical explanation, which is part of these lectures, in which he actually, in five minutes, gives you a real understanding of the theory of tonality. Can we just look at the second clip, then?

[Clip plays]

• What we’re trying for is a very high overview of musical development in terms of a vocabulary constantly being enriched by more and more remote and chromatic overtones. It’s as if we could see the whole of music developing from prehistory to the present in two minutes, and let’s, again, pretend we’re hominids, and that the smash hit of the moment is, let’s say, “Fair Harvard.” Here we are in our hominid hut crooning ♪ Fair Harvard! They sons to thy ♪ and now, maybe our wives and maybe our prepubescent sons join in, and automatically, we’re singing not in unison, but in octaves, since men’s and women’s voices are naturally an octave apart.

♪ And with blessings surrender thee ♪ Now, that octave interval, I wish I could sing an octave so I could really show you what I mean, but that octave interval happens to be the first interval of the harmonic series, as you remember, right? Okay, now, centuries pass, and the next interval of the harmonic series is assimilated by humanity, namely, the fifth, and now we can be singing this: ♪ By those festival rites and the ♪ Now, of course, this little change brings us forward a mere 10 million years into the 10th century AD and into a fairly sophisticated musical culture, but now we admit the next interval of the series, the fourth, and now we can mix intervals of the octave and the fifth and the fourth.

Now, that’s beginning to sound like polyphony, and again comes a great leap as music absorbs the next overtone, the third, and just listen to the difference. It’s a whole new music, richer, mellower, with a new coloristic warmth, and as we know, this new interval of the third 'cause I like the older sound better, but anyway, as we know, this new interval of the third introduces into music the phenomenon of the triad so that now, “Fair Harvard” can begin to sound more like its Victorian self. And so there is born what we now call total music, a stable tonal language firmly rooted in the basic notes of the harmonic series, the fundamental and its first different overtone, the fifth, now and forevermore to be known as the tonic and the dominant, and that fifth interval really does dominate because once this tonic-dominant relationship is established, it’s a field day for composers.

There can now be fifths of fifths of fifths of fifths, each one of them a new tonic producing a new dominant, a whole circle of fifths, 12 of them, in fact, always winding up with the starting tone, whether proceeding upwards, let’s say, from the low C, G, D, A, E, B, F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, D-sharp, B-flat, F, C. That’s, again, C, believe it or not. Or proceeding downward, starting from that C, F, B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, D-flat, G-flat, B, E, A, no, I’m sorry, G, C. Back to C. That’s a circle of 12 fifths, and that’s the answer I promised you. That’s how we get the 12 different tones of our chromatic scale. Other words, if you take all those 12 of the circle of fifths and putting 'em together in scale order, you’ll get this. And what’s more, those 12 notes generate a circle of 12 keys through which, thanks to the perfecting of the tempered system, composers can now go freewheeling at their own chromatic pleasure.

Now, this means that ultimately, “Fair Harvard” can sound like this. Now, that’s chromatic porridge, and in our own century, it’s going to become goulash. How does music contain this loose, runny chromaticism? By the basic principle of diatonicism, that stable relationship of tonics and dominants, subdominants and supertonics, and new dominants and new tonics, and we can now modulate as freely as we want, as chromatically as we want, and still have complete tonal control. This great system of tonal controls was perfected and codified by Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, whose genius was to balance so delicately and so justly, these two forces of chromaticism and diatonicism, forces that were equally powerful and presumably contradictory in nature.

[Clip ends]

• So that’s just the clip of that. It’s a remarkable ability, in that short period, to describe the idea of tonal music. Of course, it implies, as well, point that Bernstein made often, that he was in favour of tonal music at a time, of course, where there was quite a considerable amount of atonality. I’ve already gave a lecture some while back about Schoenberg, but he was, by and large, within the tonal framework, and, of course, he was a composer of some considerable note. Firstly, of course, there were the musicals, the three great ones: “On the Town,” 1944; “Wonderful Town,” 1953; and, of course, the great one, “West Side Story” in 1957, transferring the tragic rivalries of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a Manhattan gang scene. The score ingeniously sort of binds these songs and dance numbers with a kind of symphonic logic to it. Bernstein tried to compose a comic opera “Candide” in '56 based on the book by Voltaire.

It’s not particularly been well-received, although it does have some magnificent theatre music within it. There was, of course, a whole lot of other material. The film score, the classic “On the Waterfront” in 1954. In addition to it, because, for reasons I’ll come to, Bernstein saw himself, in many ways, as a modern version of Gustav Mahler, he composed a series of symphonies, three in particular. The first, “Jeremiah,” 1942, is with a setting for a mezzo-soprano of a Hebrew text from the Book of Lamentations, Eicha; the second, “The Age of Anxiety” in '49, which has a solo piano elaborating a poem from W.H. Auden; and the third, the “Kaddish” Symphony, which, of course, sets the Kaddish prayer for soprano and two choruses and has a narrator who has an anguished dialogue with God.

When I prepared this lecture, I really wanted to talk a lot about the “Kaddish” Symphony, and I had a discussion with Trudy by way of e-mail. We decided we’ll do, I’ll do this lecture in early May because I think the “Kaddish” Symphony deserves a full treatment on its own, both for its music and for its theological implications, but, of course, “West Side Story” was the most famous of all. What I just got here is a three-minute clip of an ageing, an aged Bernstein conducting “West Side Story,” a production of “West Side Story,” in which he basically is trying to rehearse his orchestra, and can we therefore see clip 3?

[Clip plays]

• We’re okay on the blues. We’re going to have to lay in eight bars of the two low saxes of the blues. We do that later. They can’t get any bass.

• [Engineer] Might get the baritone-

• Clarinet, very light. It’s all chamber music now. Everything way down.

• [Engineer] Here we go. “Dance at the Gym,” 4C, take 73. No. Hey, please. 1, 2, 3, blump, bleep, blah.

• [Engineer] We’re rolling. Oh, those pitched drums are much too low. It should be so elegant and ♪ Doo tuh-doo-dah, doo dee-do ♪ Hm? Little high ones and tambourine, just touch it just as lightly as possible, all right?

• [Engineer] We better go back. Let’s take 74.

• Too much. Too smooth.

• More maracas. Where were they?

• Sorry, what happens to the little maracas?

• [Engineer] It’s not there?

• Sorry.

• All right, so we have to do it again.

• Lenny, are you happy with the pitches of the drums in 13?

• Clarinet.

• Yes. Yes, I am, but I’m not happy with your 16th notes. They’re too fast. ♪ Bum bu-du-wah ♪ It’s not that. It’s ♪ Um bah bah-du-wee ♪ Very elegant and-

• [Engineer] Still same take. We’re rolling. 75.

• Maracas. Okay.

• You’re not thinking I’m someone else?

• I know you are not.

[Clip ends]

• But it just gives you a sense of Bernstein conducting his own composition. I want to, if I may, shift to another theme, which you can’t discount, which is Bernstein’s political career. Before he became famous, there’s no question, Leonard Bernstein was already getting himself, as it were, into trouble in context of the Red Scare, to which I already made reference in an earlier lecture that I gave, and a lot of his thinking at the time, according to Barry Seldes, who wrote a really good book called “Leonard Bernstein,” said Lenny was a socialist. “I dispel the idea,” writes Seldes, “that Bernstein was apolitical "or only occasionally political. "One comes to see "that his political commitments and activities "were highly important to him, "that he was victimised because of them, "and they often played a significant role "in his artistic career.”

There’s no doubt that, like so many other young people at the time, in the 1930s, Harvard, et cetera, Bernstein had looked to the Soviet Union as a bulwark in the fight against Hitler, and at that time, so many were unable to distinguish between the Russian revolution of '17 and the vicious regime headed by Stalin who had claimed, of course, to represent socialism, but obviously didn’t do so for all sorts of reasons that we don’t have to go at the moment. During World War II, when the U.S. and the USSR were allies, Bernstein appeared with Paul Robeson and became involved with the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. After the war, as the Cold War witch hunt began, he came to the defence of the Hollywood Ten, of which we’ve spoken already, the screenwriters who’d been subpoenaed and later jailed for contempt, and he campaigned, again, for someone I mentioned in that lecture, the third-party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, who had been the former vice president under Roosevelt and who had really had symbolised the hopes of a continuation of the popular front.

By 1950, he was formally identified as a subversive in the notorious anti-communist periodical “Counterattack” and “Red Channels.” He was blacklisted by CBS, the network whose radio broadcasts had first brought him to fame back in '43. The next three years, he lived in fear of being called to testify before the various committees, including the McCarthy committee in Washington. He wasn’t called, but he was forced in 1953 to submit a lengthy and humiliating affidavit confessing to various errors in his past political life and swearing a loyalty to the U.S. in order to regain his passport. This is in '53, only weeks after the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, of course, have also been spoken about in the Lockdown series, on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage for the USSR.

Senator Joseph McCarthy, of course, was at the peak of his powers, and you could well understand why Bernstein felt particularly anxious. He got his passport back, was removed from the CBS blacklist by the 1950s. By '56, he was engaged again as a guest conductor at the New York Philharmonic under his old mentor Dimitri Mitropoulos, and, of course, we know by '58 he was its musical director. The irony, of course, was this: that when the groundbreaking ceremonies for the Lincoln Centre Art Complex that took place in '59, it was he, Bernstein, as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, who greeted President Dwight Eisenhower, who, of course, had been president '52 to '60 during a whole period of this horrendous, this horrendous McCarthy era.

There’s no question that it influenced him throughout his life, but if he was interested in that throughout his life, he was also profoundly interested in Israel, and Bernstein had a deep existential commitment to the state of Israel. I thought very long and hard about whether I replay it. Decided against it simply because I’d done this before, but last time I gave a lecture on Bernstein, I played a clip from his visit in 1967 to Israel at just at the time of the Six-Day War. When the war ended and Israel had recaptured Jerusalem, which was therefore reclaimed as being the capital, undivided Jerusalem, capital of Israel, even if, at that time, wasn’t recognised by all, Bernstein gave a concert in which he conducted Mahler 2 on Mt. Scopus, and in which everybody, including Ben-Gurion, Dayan, et cetera, they’re all there. Absolutely extraordinary event, but what I did want to do is just play you a short clip from a young woman talking about the contribution that Leonard Bernstein made to Israeli music in general and the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in particular, so if we can have clip 4.

[Clip plays]

• Leonard Bernstein began working with the Philharmonic in Israel in the 1940s, pre-statehood, the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra, which later became the Israel Philharmonic. Over a lifetime, Bernstein conducted the Israel Philharmonic across 25 different seasons, more than most orchestras with which he worked anywhere in the world. Bernstein truly felt the power of cultural diplomacy and the ability of the arts, and particularly music in Israel, to show the world what this young, small nation was capable of. He made a point to be in Israel during key moments in the life of the state: during the War for Independence in 1948, and again in 1967, only one month after the Six-Day War, where he conducted a concert on Mt. Scopus celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem. He played Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, the “Resurrection Symphony” for that concert, and he spoke at length in his preconcert remarks about what it means to play a “Resurrection Symphony” like Mahler’s in Israel: “It gives meaning to this piece "that it has nowhere else in the world.”

[Clip ends]

• And so I just want to put place it on record, and I’m going to talk now about Mahler and Bernstein because you can’t have, I mean, even “Maestro” had to concede that, that Leonard Bernstein’s role in relation to Mahler was quite extraordinary. In 1947, he conducted the New York City Orchestra in a memorial concert to Mayor La Guardia, and he played the Mahler 2. By that stage, at that stage I think we should record just after the Second World War, Mahler was hardly in vogue, in fact, to the contrary, and, of course, he had been totally banned in Germany, but he wasn’t exactly played very much else in the world, and indeed, Howard Taubman in “The New York Times” the day after that concert wrote as follows: “Those who find Mahler a stirring experience "have a right to keep finding that in him, "but for those of us who wish "that he had either a good editor "or far more self-critique, "we have a right never to listen to him, ever,” and so what was fascinating for me was there was a young Leonard Bernstein, at that point, 29 years old, conducting the Mahler 2, the “Resurrection Symphony,” in really hostile circumstances in New York, but the point the story is that, to a large degree, he continued to promote Mahler right through his career.

As I say, I think, in many ways, he identified with Mahler, and what I wanted to say about that, which I find really extraordinary, was his relationship, as I’ve indicated earlier, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra because the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was one of the orchestras, together with the Israeli Philharmonic, which Bernstein had a very, very significant relationship, and what is remarkable is that in 1971, he played the Mahler 5 with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. As one commentator said about it, “On the surface, it just looked like any other concert, "but consider that from the interwar period "onwards into the 1970s, "that is, at least until '71, "the Vienna Philharmonic had not played Mahler symphonies "with any regularity at all. "The country’s cultural establishment at Harvard, "a deep-seated animus towards Mahler "on the basis that his compositions , "quote, 'a Jewish,’ unquote, sound.”

Among German-speaking critics, this line of attack predated the Nazis, as when Rudolf Louis wrote in 1909, “It is repulsive to me because the music acts Jewish.” During rehearsals of the Mahler Symphony 9, which we know because some of these rehearsals were recorded, Bernstein became so frustrated at the failure, arguably the reluctance of Vienna musicians to evoke the klezmer-inflected character of the Mahler style, which, of course, is so central to much of Mahler. One thinks from right from the beginning, from Mahler 1, that you get that klezmer style. He actually turned to the orchestra, this great orchestra that, ironically, Mahler himself had conducted some 70 years earlier with the words, “This is not Mahler.” To quote, again, from writings of Mahler, sorry, of Bernstein, “It would’ve been amazing scene to observe. "Just a quarter century "after the Second World War had ended, "here was an American Jewish conductor "teaching one of the most distinguished orchestras "in the German-speaking world "how to play, or perhaps accept, their own native music.”

This is, quote, “A liminal space between music and history,” and there’s no question that Leonard Bernstein had a very significant role in ensuring that Mahler took his rightful place within the musical scene, indeed, within the really front-rank composers, and I couldn’t refrain from ending this lecture with the last three minutes of the real Leonard Bernstein, as opposed to Bradley Cooper, conducting the famous concert in, I think, 1973 at Ely Cathedral in England. Obviously, Cooper had been sufficiently schooled in conducting the orchestra, and perhaps he did quite a good job, but let me just say a little bit about the 2nd symphony of Gustav Mahler and its significance. As I indicated, Bernstein played it as well in 1967 when Israel took over the entire Jerusalem, city of Jerusalem. The 2nd symphony took, and, you know, it deserves its own lecture. Of course it does, but let me just make a few points. He composed the 2nd symphony over a period of seven years, beginning the first and second movements in January of 1888, and then moving on.

Took seven years to do it. He did, in a sense, set out a series of programmatic descriptions of the piece. In two of them, he suggests that the symphony is about death, life, and resurrection of a heroic individual. It might well have been Mahler himself, and, of course, the very long first movement referred to as a Totenfeier, is effectively a funereal piece of music. There’s no question. In fact, so much, it is so overwhelming that Mahler marked the score that there should be a break between the first and the second movements, and in most decent productions thereof, indeed, that’s exactly what happens. The conductor stops at the end of the first movement and takes significant break. I obviously haven’t got the time, nor is it the place to go through all of the movements, but let me just say something about the final movement because we’re going to hear the last three minutes.

It starts with a terrifying fanfare, and, again, what’s so interesting about Mahler is just as Bernstein was influenced by Mahler, Mahler was influenced by his hero, Beethoven. The introduction to the 5th Symphony replicates the introduction of the choral finale of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and then there are a series of themes built from falling fifths, ascending scales, descending triplets. It’s quite extraordinary. There’s an offstage horn as well, and the music builds up where there’s this major choir which sings, and just to give you the last couple of, in English, the last couple of stanzas of the music because it’s about resurrection. O believe you were not born in vain. You have not lived, suffered in vain. What came into being, it must cease to be. What passed away, it must rise again. Stop trembling. Prepare yourself to live. O grief, you all-perpetuator, I am forced to you. O death, you all-conqueror, now you are defeated with wings that I won for myself. In fervent pursuit of love, I will waft away to the light that no eye has penetrated. I shall die in order to live. Rise again, yes, you will rise again, my heart in a moment. What you bested, it’ll carry you to God.

Now, I mention this because the piece ends, obviously, with that music and this extraordinary buildup of the falling fifth, the ascending scales, the chorus and the horns. The organ joins in with the final statement of this chorale, and bells finally chime as the brass instruments proclaim the end of the symphony and the triumph of the resurrection. Why do I mention this all to you? Because I want, because all conductors, in a sense, when they get here, they’re in raptures. I really, when I do a lecture on Mahler 2, can play you five or six of the great conductors doing the end. For me, despite what Taubman said, he’s very welcome, he’s probably dead by now, of course, to have not listened to Mahler.

For me, this is the greatest symphony. It’s an extraordinary ending, and Bernstein does it as you’d expect Bernstein, with all the flamboyance and the intensity and the emotion. People say about Leonard Bernstein that in his sort of little finger he had more instinctive music than any other conductor, and it’s well worth watching these three minutes because I think it reflects luminously, and what I’ve been trying to say for the last 45 minutes. Let’s listen to Leonard Bernstein, last three minutes, the Ely Cathedral production of Mahler’s No.2 Symphony, the “Resurrection.”

[Clip plays]

Ah, yeah, so much for trying to have a dramatic ending and having the sound completely wonky, which I had tested and was very good when I listened to it. I do apologise. I’m not quite sure what happened there. I do apologise very much for that, but you could see just the style of Bernstein in conducting the Mahler 2, which was utterly, you know, he was really in a very, very different world, as it were. It is said of his conducting style… “The New Yorker” in 1958 wrote two pieces, very wonderful pieces on the young Bernstein, and said about his conducting style that his technique of communicating with an orchestra involved the hands, the shoulders, the pelvis, the knees, to say nothing of the forehead, the eyes, and the teeth. In many ways that summarises him particularly well. Let me just turn to the questions that are… Again, copious apologies for the fact that you weren’t able to benefit from the wonderful ending to the great symphony, which is so worth listening to, but I’m sure if you get a, any of you have a recording, you’ll listen to it and appreciate what I was trying to say.

Q&A and Comments

Gerald says, “You said "all that should have been put in the recent film "should have been a movie "more like the one called ‘Mahler.’” Well, I just think that, I mean, obviously, a music director has a choice as to what to do. I just think that if you do a film about “Maestro” and Bernstein, to do it all about a marriage and not capture any of these other nuances, none of them, in the film, seems to me to be a great pity, to a remarkable sort of polymath who was, in many ways, perhaps the greatest musician that America produced in the latter part of the 20th century.

Q: Marilyn says, “Bernstein started his career as Toscanini conducted the NBC within the twilight of his… "Would you compare their conducting styles? "Who would you rate as the greater?” A: It’s very hard to do that. I mean, Toscanini, of course, at the time, you know, was regarded as the greatest, except for those who thought that Furtwängler was the man. The one thing which I read in preparation for this lecture was that everybody called Bernstein, “Lenny.” No one would’ve called Toscanini, “Artie,” after Arturo, and he was a very, very totalitarian form of conductor with a terrible temper, who had a particular, certainly, penchant for very, very precise playing in terms of the score. Very different to the intuitive nature of Furtwängler and somewhat more emotional engagement that Bernstein had, particularly, it seems to me, when he was conducting Mahler, with whom he identified so much.

Thank you very much to Barbara and Rita, and again, I apologise copiously for the bad sound. I just want to see if there’s anything else here that I need to address. There is a… Sorry, somebody’s asked, and I just being useless in being able to pick the whole thing up, but ah, yes.

Q: Harold says, “In the CD ‘Hatikvah,’ celebrating the unification of Jerusalem, I believe that it only contained the last movement of Mahler’s 2. Is the recording the entire symphony as performed that day?” A: I’m not sure. I need to have a check of that, Harold, because when I played the part of it, it came from a documentary called “Bernstein in Israel,” and parts of it were played there. I’m not sure that that was the case, and thank you very much to everybody else who’s… I’m almost feel I’ve got to somehow get you, to get you to listen to the Mahler 2, and I have to ask Trudy for specific indulgence to do that.

Marcel says, “I can’t…” Thank you very much, Marcel, and you sound please do mention Bradley Cooper, whose unforgettable, sincere interpretation of Mahler was, in the main, overshadowed in most awards. Yeah, I mean, I do think, if I can just say, he did a pretty good job of conducting the Mahler 2, and I think he captured some of the intensity of Leonard Bernstein, who, as I conclude and wish you a good evening, for me, Bernstein is one of my heroes because I just think he was a superstar conductor, a very thoughtful composer, an unbelievable educator, very committed to the state of Israel, very committed to progressive politics, and someone who we should be proud of really has having come from, you know, from the Jewish tradition, which he never forgot.

Thank you very much, and goodnight to everybody.