An Interview with Jamie Bernstein Thomas

Leonard Bernstein's charismatic legend has not diminished in the decade since his death
By Thomas May

Leonard Bernstein was the great wise daddy figure for entire generations of music lovers, introducing them--not to mention a vast legion of today's star performers--to the essence of what makes music exciting. Whether it was a matter of indisputable classics or newfangled compositions, the man who became lovingly known as "Lenny" seemed to possess the open sesame not just to understand music's inner magic but to convey it with the most incandescent electricity. And his legend and influence continue to flourish. On the occasion of the music world's observance of the 10th anniversary of Bernstein's death (on October 14, 1990), Jamie Bernstein Thomas, the eldest of his three children, spoke to Amazon.com editor Thomas May about some favorite musical moments, early memories of growing up in a Mahler fanatic's household, and the indefinable charisma that made her father such an icon.

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Amazon.com: How would you characterize Leonard Bernstein's legacy as we look back?

Jamie Bernstein Thomas: Now that we've just turned the corner on the century, it's easy to equate Bernstein's life span with the century itself, because he pretty much did cover it. When you look, you can really see that his influence on music was tremendous. He's like a syzygy, where the planetary bodies line up in a way that's rarely duplicated again. He was a composer and a conductor--and though he was such a performer, Bernstein also had this tremendous inner life. And--he was pretty easy on the eyes. Really attractive, but also really good at communicating. It's all these things that came together that made him unique in the 20th century. It's also true that he was the first American classical musician to be really taken seriously. When he started out conducting, Americans never conducted big symphony orchestras. It was always these traditional European guys--Americans were just upstarts.

Amazon.com: Of all his identities--as composer and pianist and conductor and teacher and so on--which comes closest to what your father was really all about?

Bernstein Thomas: Teacher! There's no question. He was a compulsive teacher, a compulsive rabbi. And it was just his way of being that he had to communicate with you about something. More often than not, he was sharing with you the thing that he was excited about--that's teaching at its best.

Amazon.com: A lot of retrospective events honoring your father are happening: for example, there's an impressive 10-CD box from the New York Philharmonic of previously unreleased performances, as well as live concerts all over. What are some of the events that stand out for you?

Bernstein Thomas:

They recently did Mass at the Vatican. My father's jaw would have hung open in amazement, because when Mass came out, it was incredibly controversial and the Catholic Church took a stand against it in America. It was an international cast. And just a couple of months ago [summer 2000], at La Scala, they did West Side Story. At La Scala! That was pretty cool. The Maria was Monserrat Caballé, and the Tony was a fabulous Australian guy--the biggest Tony I ever saw!

Amazon.com: It's notable how much space Bernstein's official biography on the leonardbernstein.com site devotes to nonmusical activities--political commitments and humanitarian interests. How did those other roles play into his life?

Bernstein Thomas: From the beginning, I think he was always involved in politics and issues of human rights--it was just something that was in everybody's blood back then. My father was always a liberal, even very left wing all the way back to his college days. And it stayed with him all his life--he wasn't kidding. As he got more famous, he discovered that he was more able to make a bigger noise about the issues he cared about, and he got in trouble many a time--as we all know, [there was] the Radical Chic incident.

Amazon.com: How did he react to the Tom Wolfe story?

Bernstein Thomas: It's a long, sad story. It just about did my mother in--it was really her event. She was putting together a fundraiser for a group of New York Black Panthers who were awaiting trial [on what turned out to be concocted terrorism charges]. My father walked into this fundraiser about halfway through; he was coming home from a rehearsal all charged up. And in his inimitable way, he just kind of took over. And then Tom Wolfe turned it into this phantasmagorical essay. The fundraiser did raise the money, and then in the end, the judge threw out the whole case. Later--in the 1980s, through the Freedom of Information Act--we discovered that all the demonstrations that had been disrupting our lives in front of our building as a result [of the controversy] were mostly FBI plants. My father was the laughing stock of New York for a while there, but he never backed down.

Amazon.com: Do you remember when Mahler first became a household word for you?

Bernstein Thomas:

I remember it really well. I was in school at the time, first hearing about Mahler and not knowing who he was. I saw my father put this bumper sticker in his Mahler Second score that said, "Mahler Grooves!" (The Mahler Gesellschaft had sent it as a present.) And we all had Mahler sweatshirts. The way we learned Mahler at first was through the Fourth Symphony--it's one of the shortest and has a boy soprano in the last movement, and the sleigh bells. It's very friendly compared with some of his other, gnarlier symphonies. And I remember there was a summer when my father was learning the piece, and he kept playing Bruno Walter's recording of it on this stereo that he plugged in by the swimming pool. So I just associate the Mahler Fourth and the sleigh bells with swimming in the pool.

Amazon.com: Bernstein made over 400 recordings--what are some of your favorites?

Bernstein Thomas:

My father wrote Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs for Artie Shaw, who couldn't premiere it in the end, so [he conducted it] with Benny Goodman instead. And that recording rocks--you just can't believe how it jumps! Another really good recording of Bernstein material is The Age of Anxiety with Lucas Foss at the piano. The fast movement, the scherzo from that piece--it's called "The Masque"--is a great tune. He plays it really fast, and it's hair-raising!

Amazon.com: What do you think is his most underrated work as a composer?

Bernstein Thomas:

I'm very fond of Songfest, which has some of his best tunes. He recycles a lot of material from his failed musical, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue , the last Broadway show he wrote (with Alan Jay Lerner). It was a total flop and closed in a week. He wound up using a lot of that music, because the score was never recorded. Some of it went into Songfest , and some of it went into his opera A Quiet Place --which also, by the way, has beautiful music in it. My personal favorite tune that he ever wrote ended up [in Songfest] in a setting of a Walt Whitman poem called "To What You Said." But DG has released this new piece formed out of the material from 1600 , called A White House Cantata, so that it could be performed in a concert version. It's got fabulous singers on it: Thomas Hampson, June Anderson, and Barbara Hendricks.

Amazon.com:

In the 10 years since your father's death, one thing that's striking is how the usual pattern has been reversed--Leonard Bernstein's stock has actually continued to rise, instead of the usual eclipse.

Bernstein Thomas:

That's what happened in his lifetime. My father had the misfortune of being a tonal composer just when atonality was the coin of the realm. And it brought no end of heartache to him that his music was not really acknowledged as significant by the academic musical community, whose opinion mattered to him very much. He set great store in education and intellectual circles, and he really wished he could have been accepted by all those kinds of people. But they were all devoted to serial music and atonality. My father used it, but he really didn't want to give up tonality. He had a big crisis in the 1960s, where he took a year off from conducting to write something. So finally--very much like his humanitarian and political issues--he said, "I'm writing tonal music. I'm sorry if you don't like it." And he wrote Chichester Psalms that year, which is one of his most popular and beloved pieces. It's totally accessible and tonal and unapologetically so.

Amazon.com: Were you able to attend any of the final concert at Tanglewood [released on DG's box Lenny: The Legend Lives On]?

Bernstein Thomas:

Sure, I was there! I nearly had a nervous breakdown during the Beethoven Seventh ... we could all tell what a hard time he was having up there. I think I hardly heard the music, I was so anxious as to whether he would get through it at all. And we all knew he was having so much trouble breathing; he had the oxygen tank backstage, and he had a coughing fit during one of the movements, the scherzo, and he was conducting with his nose, because he was kind of gripping the edge of the podium. Our hearts were in our mouths.

Amazon.com: What do you think your father would make of the Internet revolution today--a new medium for arts education? And what would he find most surprising about the musical scene today?

Bernstein Thomas:

Certainly, he came along just when television [was proliferating], and that was perfect timing. He would have found something terrific to do [on the Internet], I'm sure. [As for the musical scene], maybe he wouldn't have been so surprised, but I think he would have been elated to see the way tonality has come back--that composers now freely use tonality without fear of being excommunicated.

Amazon.com: Why do you think there's been nobody to fill in the vacuum here of trying to make these connections with the new generation?

Bernstein Thomas: There's nobody who does all the things together. There might be a good conductor over here, and a terrific composer over there, and a good communicator over there. But not all in one package. I must feel optimistic since I'm putting my own hand into it. I think people have really woken up about the importance of keeping the arts in the schools. You know in the 1970s and '80s, there were these enormous budget cutbacks, and the first thing that got cut in every school budget was music. And now people have really caught on to the mistake and are making reparations; there are many movements to get music back into the schools and it's very heartening.