Worst side story
Rupert Christiansen
LEONARD BERNSTEIN by Joan Peyser
Bantam, £14.95
LEONARD BERNSTEIN by Michael Freedland
Harrap, £12.95
Whatever has come over the guild of American biographers? Once one could rely on the fraternity either charting a pilgrim's progress from log cabin to White House, or at least stripping away the Impeccable public man to reveal the sensi- tive domestic animal underneath. But now a chillier spirit dominates: the principle has become to prove that your subject is a liar — disloyal and hypocritical, peddling senti- ments which are inconsistent with be- haviour. And to the gallery of victims others have recently included Reagan as demythologised by Gary Wills and Sinatra by Kitty Kelley — is now added Leonard Bernstein. Yes, lovely cuddly Lenny, with his chutzpah and irresistible grin; Lenny the great conductor of Mahler, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky; Lenny the com- municator; Lenny, the source of the music for perhaps the finest example of its genre, West Side Story.Joan Peyser's biography refuses to endorse these fond images, and another popular idol is sent headlong into the mire of his own mauvaise foi.
Fortunately, one suspects that Lenny has enough resilience and talent to rise from the ashes of his humiliation at the pen of Miss Peyser. She tells us that he tends to paint a fancifully bleak picture of his childhood; that he has never told the whole truth about his relationship and rivalry with the Greek conductor Dmitri Mitro- poulos; that he pinched the melody and development of 'Tonight' in West Side Story from Britten's Peter Grimes. He sulks if he is not the centre of attention; he needs to be loved, but is not very good at loving back. And so on.
For all the relentless melodrama in Peyser's manner, it does not actually amount to that horrible an indictment. I find myself still able to think of Bernstein as someone who most of the time probably tries to do his feeble moral best, with a good deal of the usual interference from his appetites and insecurities. And, more Important, I cannot see that by the end of the book Peyser has justified her initial claim that the 'reason for going into the personal areas of Bernstein's life' are that the evidence 'can make a big difference in the way we hear Bernstein as well as the way we assess his achievements.'
It may, I think, even be Peyser who is being disingenuous here. Her book has sold largely on its revelations about Bern- stein's promiscuous homosexuality, and the incidental pulling-out of the closet of a number of other major American compos- ers — Blitzstein, Thomson, Menotti, Bar- ber, and Copland among them. None of this is exactly new in musical circles, but it does provide the frisson necessary to make a book a best-seller. (Don't get too ex- cited: salacious detail is confined to a little toe-licking and the tantalising mention of a `homosexual orgy arranged by Gore Vid- al'.) Nothing, however, that she uncovers does make the slightest difference to the way we hear or assess anything or any- body; nor, in the event, does Peyser make any effort to prove that it does.
Her moral ground is much firmer else- where. The criticism of his silly spon- sorship of the Black Panthers and his unthinking participation in the 'radical chic' brigade during the late 1960s is unanswerable — although to jump on his occasional habit of mimicking what she humorlessly describes as 'an uneducated black locution' seems somewhat priggish. She sensitively treats the complexities of his attitude to his Jewish ancestry (col- oured by a stern and orthodox father little pleased by his son's vocation and de- meanour), and brings out all the ironies of his reciprocated passion for Vienna, that notoriously anti-Semitic city where, like his greater forebear Mahler, he is accepted and venerated as the Court Jew, the exception who also confirms the rule.
Peyser's previous biography focused on another musician torn between functions as composer, conductor, intellectual, and institutional figurehead — Pierre Boulez, who disastrously succeeded Bernstein as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Boulez, however, has produced a radically different oeuvre to that of Bernstein, concentrated and im- maculately theorised where Bernstein's sprawls and blubbers, greedily trying to have it all ways and refusing to abandon conventional tonality. Boulez has un- doubtedly managed the balance better and has given the language of music a firm push onwards, but he has no popular master- piece like West Side Story to his credit. What claims can be made for the rest of Bernstein's composition — such as the `Serenade', the piano concerto 'The Age of Anxiety', or the Mass — remains a matter of whether you regard their immediacy of impact as gloss for a tarnished vulgarity or as the brilliance of uninhibited creative energy. 'The better a conductor you be- come, the harder it is to be a composer', Bernstein admits, and perhaps his tragedy is precisely that he has become a conductor of such passion and power.
Peyser is unilluminating on this subject — there is no adequate discussion of either Bernstein's conducting technique or the reasons for his charismatic hold over orchestras — nor does she give due weight to his admirable and extensive forays into television pedagogy. Nevertheless, in its ruthless and inelegant and imbalanced way, this remains a forceful book, chiefly because Peyser has such a properly cynical and informed grasp of the workings of American musical life. As a portrait of Bernstein's soul, it is crude, even cruel; as a detailed case-study of the mechanics of an extraordinary career, it is riveting. Michael Freedland's book seems anody- ne by comparison, a tepid exercise in show-biz journalism, innocent and point- less. Somewhere between the two biog- raphies, one feels ultimately, is a dis- appointed man, fated to the archetypal American doom of watching his talent being squandered on success.
Rupert Christiansen is the author of Prima Donnas (Bodley Head, £15, Penguin, £3.95)
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