Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein by Jonathan Cott (review)

A contributing editor for Rolling Stone and an author of sixteen previous books, Jonathan Cott displays great interviewing prowess in this retelling of the last long interview with Leonard Bernstein. On assignment for Rolling Stone, Cott had a twelve-hour-long interview with Bernstein in 1989, within a year of Bernstein’s death, that encompassed dinner and drinking, vodka and wine. With a cigarette in hand and peppering his remarks with profanity and sexual references, Bernstein covered his musical career, musings on music, intellectual insights, and assorted tidbits from his rich and fascinating life. Cott was fortunate to find an interview subject who had as sharp a memory as Bernstein did.

Cott begins his book with a prelude and then delves into the heart of it by putting his comments and questions in italics and giving Bernstein’s responses underneath. He ends the book with a postlude, and an insert of photographs is included as well. The book includes a brief bibliography, and endnotes are at a minimum with just five. Instead, Cott puts any explanatory text in brackets in the body of the work itself. The upside of this approach is that the work is fluid and gives readers a sense of how the interview unfurled as well. The downside is that the book is not always accessible to those who do not have in-depth knowledge of classical music; more explanatory text and footnotes would have helped in this regard.

Nevertheless, Cott provides an intriguing portrait of this man who was one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century. Who would have known, for instance, that Bernstein was in his apartment at the Dakota in New York City when John Lennon was gunned down in the archway of the building? Or that Bernstein was a lover of Indian music and enjoyed the Beatles, too? Or that he had a “Mahler Grooves” bumper sticker affixed to the first page of his score of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony?

Bernstein’s personality shines through in this book, and it certainly matches his larger-than-life, exuberant persona as a conductor. We learn that he had an amazing body of musical knowledge (no surprise there) and that he relished teaching—he was, after all, the conductor of fifty-three Young People’s Concerts, a series of family concerts of classical music of the New York Philharmonic. Cott writes that Bernstein was “one of the most honored creative artists of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most productive,” with his twenty-three Grammy Awards, ten Emmy Awards, and twenty-two honorary degrees (14). More than a conductor, he also was a “composer, pianist, writer, educator, lecturer, television host, human rights and peace activist”—I would add intellectual to that list of descriptions as well. And in addition, Bernstein wrote five books (16).

Cott also provides a personal perspective on what it was like to be an audience member of Bernstein’s by sharing with the reader his own experiences. He first encountered Bernstein as an eleven-year-old watching television in 1954, which led him to become a fan. In 1958, when Bernstein became musical director of the New York Philharmonic, Cott began attending his concerts in person in New York City over the next decades. After attending a Carnegie Hall performance of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1979, Cott went with his companion to the nearby Studio 54, the famous disco, to dance the night away, and found Bernstein dancing there as well!

Although Bernstein disliked “What’s my favorite” questions, he revealed that his personal favorite record that he had ever made was a performance of Beethoven’s C-sharp Minor Quartet, op. 131, that he recorded with sixty string players of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1977. Even though he and Cott had talked for twelve hours, he was generous enough to play some of it for...