Long before he died in 1990 at 72, Bernstein was the stuff of legends – so many, in fact, that this one doesn’t turn up in Humphrey Burton’s meticulously detailed Leonard Bernstein (594 pages. Doubleday. $25). Plenty of others do: this isn’t an authorized biography, but Burton had access to an Everest of material. (The Bernstein family helped him, but had no control over what he wrote.) A British TV director, now artistic adviser to the Barbican Centre in London, he worked closely with Bernstein for 30 years. Since they were also friends (Bernstein even played the organ at Burton’s wedding), he could have confected a Valentine, something akin to the smooches Lenny bestowed on almost anyone. (Before Bernstein met Pope Paul VI, a friend cabled, ““Remember: the ring not the lips.’’) Instead, he delivers an evenhanded look at a tormented genius. It’s not a book for gossipmongers – though there’s plenty about Lenny’s bisexuality – nor a musicological treatise. Burton avoids the armchair analysis endemic to pop biographies, including Joan Peyser’s trashy 1987 one about Bernstein. He assembles the materials; you fill in the canvas.
The book’s real strength is its illuminating details. There’s Lenny the schoolboy, already so fascinated by language that he invented one. Rybernian ““depended for its vocabulary on “anybody who talked funny’.’’ Lenny and his siblings spoke it; their children still do. There’s Lenny in 1948, conducting the war-torn Israel Philharmonic from a piano – he was also the soloist – in the desert. So many Israeli soldiers turned up for the concert that the Egyptians, whose pilots had reported what they thought were suspicious troop movements, prepared for an attack. There’s Lenny on tour with the New York Philharmonic in 1958, displaying his self-confessed ““lurking didactic streak’’ even from a sickbed. His wife, Felicia, told the doctor that her husband ““ne cesse pas de vomiter.’’ ““Vomir,’’ croaked Lenny.
The key to Bernstein was conflict. It’s surprising to discover how early on the great life-embracer suffered from bouts of the blackest depression. As a student, tormented by deciding who he was, he told a girlfriend, ““I have a canker in my soul.’’ Bernstein lived lavishly, but often worked for nothing. He adored his children and his wife, but had innumerable homosexual affairs. (““Felicia was the greatest love of his life,’’ Burton says. Years after her death from cancer in 1978, Bernstein told the man he was then seeing that he loved her ““passionately.’’) He wrote three great American musicals, ““On the Town,’’ ““Candide’’ and ““West Side Story,’’ but yearned to create the great American opera. When he was conducting, he thought he should be composing, and vice versa. ““It was his tragedy,’’ writes Burton, ““that being endowed with so many talents, he was forced to neglect one part of his divided self in favor of another.’’ Though Burton’s pace almost matches Bernstein’s insanely prestissimo one, a sadness hovers over the book. It’s not just that we know how it ends, but that it’s painful to witness Bernstein’s agonies.
But even in his last days, racked in pain from lung disease (he was seldom without a cigarette), Bernstein could mock himself. He announced that he was thinking about writing his eulogy: ““Cut down in the prime of his youth.’’ The sting of his death is relieved by a misprint the composer himself might have orchestrated. Actor Michael Wager, an old friend, was helping the doctor administer a shot when Bernstein suddenly collapsed and died, the book notes, ““slumped in Wagner’s arms.’’ How Lenny the word-lover would have delighted in that – except, as he might have said, ““I wish it had been Mahler.''
