Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician (review)

Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician by Barry Seldes aims to situate Bernstein and his work in the context of contemporary political developments. Each of the book's first six chapters covers a particular decade, from the 1930s through the 1980s, with a concluding seventh chapter, capped by an epilogue that puts forth the book's main thesis. Within each of the first six chapters, the author outlines socio-political trends of the particular decade under discussion; Bernstein's "political life," that is, his engagement with such trends; and the composer's work in relation to these trends.

The more general discussions about socio-political trends seem fine—the author is a professor of political science—except that they take up too much space for a slim book about Leonard Bernstein, and feature, moreover, the kind of bland generalizations more associated with a high-school text than an academic monograph. However, Seldes proves a less reliable guide concerning music history. In discussing Bernstein's involvement with Mahler, he writes, "Others were not so certain of Mahler's importance: in 1940 [sic], Aaron Copland wrote that Mahler's music was 'long-winded, trite, bombastic; he lacks taste, and sometimes he plagiarized unblushingly.' Indeed, for decades, Mahler's music had only a small audience" (p. 145). In fact, Copland early on championed Mahler, even writing a letter to the New York Times in 1925 defending the Austrian composer from the aspersions of New York's critics; and he absorbed a good deal of Mahler in his own music—all this while Bernstein was a mere child. Moreover, Seldes (a footnote qualifier notwithstanding) ignores the fuller context of Copland's quote, which reads, "Mahler's faults as composer have been dwelt upon ad nauseam. Admittedly, he is long-winded, trite, bombastic; he lacks taste, and sometimes he plagiarzies unblushingly. . . . But when all is said, there remains something extra-ordinarily touching about the man's work, something that makes one willing to put up with the weaknesses," later adding, "Mahler would be an important figure even if his music were not so engrossing as I believe it to be" (Copland, Our New Music [New York: McGraw Hill, 1941], 33)—hardly the statement of someone "not so certain of Mahler's importance." This would be a minor point had Copland not exerted so large an influence on Bernstein, or if Seldes had devoted less attention to the latter's relationship to Mahler.

This misreading seems symptomatic of other lapses. Seldes charts European modernism as a conflict between "French-Russian neoclassicists and the German atonalists" (p. 11), by which he means the second Viennese school, who were not German (as were Hindemith and Weill) and not necessarily "atonal," especially in the case of Berg. He devotes two pages to Bernstein's aesthetics professor at Harvard, David Prall, but refers to his music professor Walter Piston, an important and influential figure, simply as someone who "sat on the Harvard music faculty" (p. 12). He misrepresents a statement by Bernstein's biographer, Humphrey Burton, whose dubious assumption, apropos Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, that Bernstein "must have felt in his bones that he could do better" (Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein [New York; Doubleday, 1994], 171), gets paraphrased by Seldes as "Bernstein . . . held that he could write a better opera than any of Blitzstein's" (p. 43). Another misrepresented document, also with regard to Blitzstein: Blitzstein had written Bernstein, in reference to the latter's feeling torn about his conducting-composing career: "you are a conductor, and you are a composer. Make your choice, if you have to; I hope it will be the composer" (Marc Blitzstein to Leonard Bernstein, 19 May 1950, Correspondence, Leonard Bernstein Collection, Library of Congress) which Seldes represents as "Marc Blitzstein warned him that he needed to decide between composing and conducting" (p. 169). Then there are more minor problems. For example, the dates for the Copland...