Performance of His Life: He Composed Himself By MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

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September 21, 2008
Music
Performance of His Life: He Composed Himself By MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

LEONARD BERNSTEIN didn’t sleep much. That was just as well, since so many nights were show nights. The show — much more than a concert — was an intricate evening-long routine that had developed over his lifetime. By the last decade it went something like this.

As he awoke from a nap and performed his ablutions, you could hear the splashing, singing and kvetching over the whole apartment. It was a ritual for shaking off fatigue and the dread of having to push everything uphill all over again. The washing helped him reconnect with the “spotless servant of music” persona, one of his most treasured. A light supper followed, some light conversation and maybe a glance at the score as he quietly gathered strength. In the limo he was starting to feel the zone of his performance, testing it with snatches of old songs or punch lines.

By the time he hit the stage door, he was full of cheery greetings for everyone in sight. When he got his call, he would stand just offstage, saying his mantra, kissing his Koussevitzky cufflinks, taking the final drags of his cigarette. At the last possible second he handed it to a stagehand or cup bearer, and he was on.

He presented himself to the audience, welcoming it, blessing it and preparing it for the music’s first sounds. He turned toward the players, acknowledging them as old comrades, looking each right in the eyes. He waited for the audience to settle down, then gave his upbeat.

Those near him onstage might hear his upbeat as well as see it. He was quite vocal. He hummed, moaned, grunted, ground his teeth and breathed heavily. He used to say, “You should conduct exactly as you would play the piano.” It was a physical thing. He immersed himself in the stream of the work, pulling all the instruments under his fingers.

If it was a first night, the piece, though painstakingly rehearsed, might never have been played through completely. The players, unsure exactly what he was going to do or how it all fitted together, had to watch him every second. He liked that. He knew that musicians could get buried in their parts, looking fixedly at the same notes they had played thousands of times. He wanted the whole band to be out there with him in an experience that felt more like improvisation. He liked fun and a whiff of danger.

He thought that a performance should reveal the emotional states the composer had experienced while creating the work. For him that meant being totally involved emotionally and physically. He felt he wasn’t really doing his best unless he was swaying on the precipice of his endurance. Whether he was conducting Mahler or playing a Haydn trio, it was the same: oceans of sweat, fluttering eyes, hyper-reactive athleticism.

It’s what everyone expected. But none of it was put on. It was his authentic essential experience of music and of life. Whatever he had to do to achieve it, maintain it, he did. The public loved it, understanding that it was all part of the supreme sacrifice of himself that he was making for them.

After the final number the stagehand and cup bearer handed him a lighted cigarette and a silver tumbler filled with Scotch the second he got off the stage. A few puffs, a few gulps, and he bounded or staggered on again. When the ovation finally died down, another performance began.

Legions of autograph seekers thronged to him backstage. He would size up his supplicants with a deftness Lord Chesterfield might have admired, shifting his roles among counselor, classmate, rake. It took a long time, and there were usually still receptions and suppers ahead. As the hour grew late, sponsors and staffers might look for an opportunity to sneak out, but he would always spot them and bellow, “Sit down and shut up!” His attitude seemed to be, “After all I’ve given, I deserve anything I can get.”

It was all a part of an essential rite in which his sharing of himself could make his demons go away, at least for a while. He knew that what he most desired to do he could only do alone. But being alone was, well, lonely, and scary, and it was in the lonely moments that he realized how much it was costing him to be himself: that more than anything, by his standard, he wasn’t composing enough.

He knew that his own music was his greatest gift and message. There was a time when composing was easy for him, but it got harder as the years went on. To write the kind of music he dreamed of required time, and there was never enough time.

He knew how much his music mattered to people. He knew that it charmed them. But what he was yearning for was reverence. After all, Copland, his immediate mentor and model, had managed it. Copland’s much-beloved populist pieces like “Rodeo” were balanced by thorny ones like the Piano Variations and the Short Symphony. Their message was hard, uncompromising.

But for Bernstein the composer, compromise and collaboration seemed essential, inescapable. He thrived and suffered in his artistic partnerships: Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim. Robbins, especially, could get under his defenses and make him doubt that anything he had done was worthy. He put so much of himself into his writing, and when nothing came of it, it was an unbearable torture.

He also put a lot of other composers into his writing. But however much he may have borrowed, the whole was much more than the sum of its parts. It all added up to an instantly recognizable and authentic him. The references came completely ingenuously, and they didn’t bother him. In fact they amused him. He would grin, shrug and say, “Everybody steals, but you’ve got to steal classy.”

His music has a right-guy, right-place, right-time quality that says even tough things with a breezy confidence. He was that guy. He became the presiding maestro of the free world’s victory parties. After World War II it was Bernstein in Prague, Paris, Vienna, performing Copland’s Third Symphony. After the Six-Day War, it was Bernstein in Israel doing Mahler on Mount Scopus. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic mopped up in South America after Vice President Nixon’s disastrous motorcade. And during the cold war Bernstein hugged Shostakovich in Moscow and performed Beethoven at the Berlin Wall.

He took American music to Europe; he brought European music here. And talk about confidence; he took European music back to the Europeans. His festivals of Mahler and Nielsen caused their music to be more highly valued in their own lands. I can still hear him announcing, “I’m going to Budapest to teach the Hungarians how to play Bartok.” And he did.

It was thrilling, but it fed on itself. He stood at the center of a cultural empire with everyone looking to him as the arbiter of taste and acceptance. For a while he felt he could do anything: conduct, compose, make videos, bridge the generation gap, champion justice for radical political causes, no matter what the cost. Then, like the nation whose spirit he epitomized, he began to flinch. He feared he was being subsumed by the trappings of his fame, by the agendas of the organizations he served.

By the early ’70s he realized the danger. That is what “Mass” was really about. He carried on, the bravest of old campaigners, never losing his faith in the ideals of his youth and thrilled to see them reborn in new generations. But of himself, amid the relentless fetes, he would say, “I’m at the very peak of my decline.”

These were the years of the tours from hell. Where was he? Vienna, Rome, Tel Aviv, Paris, Tanglewood, Sapporo? Why was he there? Old friendships, new projects, bigger deals, concern for a young artist or cultural organization, because white asparagus was in season, because his loden coat had worn out, because his wife and his boyfriend were dead? And he wasn’t composing enough.

His music took a darker cast. The major pieces of the last years, like “A Quiet Place,” “Dybbuk” and “Arias and Barcarolles” largely avoided heart-on-sleeve confessions and flirted with the hermetic procedures of the 12-tone system. He treated a tone row as a game. His anagram skills made lattices of notes that yielded quartets, twisted torch songs, anything he desired. They sound like him, but their prevailing mood is turgid, despairing, even desperate.

There is a relentless search in these works for emotional honesty and intellectual rigor, and at the same time for reconciliation, simplicity and, as in the title of his last opera, “a quiet place,” where he could be generous, vulnerable, simple.

It was hard for him to let himself be simple. He usually felt that he needed to put himself and everyone else through some major test before he could relax. Composition had become another test, an agon. But writing a piece for someone he loved was a different story. Seeing him possessed by the perfect vision for a birthday or anniversary song was like witnessing a minor miracle.

It was always about people. He wrote his music for them, gave his performances for them. He wanted to teach them, touch them, include them. He wanted them to be a part of the family. He adored his own family, relishing its complex mythology, accepting the brickbats of his siblings, the challenges of his children and the love and counsel of his wife, Felicia, whose warmth and easy elegance made so much of his world possible. She set the standard of what was fitting. When she told him “Pull up your socks,” he did.

There was easy banter and brilliance at their table, and silliness and lots of love. The atmosphere was Yiddishkeit showbiz competitive, but the feeling was above all warm and inclusive. From the moment you pulled up a chair, you felt you were at home. I think he wanted you to feel the same way in the first bars of his music.

Sometimes the pileup of responsibilities was too much to bear. When that happened, he would turn night into day: stay up all night, go to sleep at 6 in the morning, have breakfast in the late afternoon. This way he could avoid people and stay in his own space without giving too much offense.

But put him back in front of an audience, and he was back on again, in search of new friends. Some of his greatest performances were given at postconcert parties for audiences of a few dozen. He would settle himself at the piano and begin a sequence of killer numbers: movie production spectacles, Victorian tear-jerkers, understated supper club rarities or operatic coloratura showstoppers sung in a subvocal rumble that Dietrich would have envied.

He knew he had everyone in his power and relished it. Never more so than the night in Washington when an esteemed critic came forward to say a wobbly good night and collapsed at his feet. “Look,” Bernstein said, “there he is, one of America’s most distinguished journalists, passed out, helpless before me. Why couldn’t you be Harold Schonberg?”

Even in the midst of the whirlwind of his life he found time to be with young artists. Mostly he had to be a kind of hit-and-run mentor, dispensing maxims and anecdotes in brief master classes in the back seats of limos. So much of his own experience had been thinking and learning on his feet in front of a hundred or a few thousand people that he knew the drill.

After one of my early performances of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony the conversation went like this. M. T. T.: “What do you think about the Adagietto?” L. B.: “What do I think? I think that when you’ve made up your mind about what it really means to you, it won’t matter what I or anyone else thinks. You’ll just know.”

So what can you say about a guy like this? So nurturing, so confrontational. He gave so much. He cared so much. I once asked him, “Did anyone ever get so much done and have so much fun as you have?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Mozart, maybe.” But he always needed more.

In the last years he was playing a game of chicken with his spirit and his health. The time ran out, and — as he had feared — he hadn’t composed enough. But in what he did compose he left us a real tracing of the places his spirit had been. Even if you never met him or saw him, his music tells you how life tasted to him, and that’s what he really wanted.

There was never any question of what he believed, what he championed. It was the joy of music. He lived it.

Michael Tilson Thomas will conduct the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday evening to kick off the citywide festival Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds. This article is adapted from a larger one that appears on his Web site, MichaelTilsonThomas.com.