Leonard Bernstein, Nov 25, 1963
New York, NY
November 25, 1963
My dear friends:
Last night the New York Philharmonic and I performed Mahler’s Second Symphony — the Resurrection — in tribute to the memory of our beloved late President. There were those who asked: Why the Resurrection Symphony, with its visionary concept of hope and triumph over worldly pain, instead of a Requiem, or the customary Funeral March from the Eroica? Why indeed? We played the Mahler symphony not only in terms of resurrection for the soul of one we love, but also for the resurrection of hope in all of us who mourn him. In spite of our shock, our shame, and our despair at the diminution of man that follows from this death, we must somehow gather strength for the increase of man, strength to go on striving for those goals he cherished. In mourning him, we must be worthy of him.
I know of no musician in this country who did not love John F. Kennedy. American artists have for three years looked to the White House with unaccustomed confidence and warmth. We loved him for the honor in which he held art, in which he held every creative impulse of the human mind, whether it was expressed in words, or notes, or paints, or mathematical symbols. This reverence for the life of the mind was apparent even in his last speech, which he was to have made a few hours after his death. He was to have said: “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason.” Learning and reason: precisely the two elements that were necessarily missing from the mind of anyone who could have fired that impossible bullet. Learning and reason: the two basic precepts of all Judaistic tradition, the twin sources from which every Jewish mind from Abraham and Moses to Freud and Einstein has drawn its living power. Learning and Reason: the motto we here tonight must continue to uphold with redoubled tenacity, and must continue, at any price, to make the basis of all our actions.
It is obvious that the grievous nature of our loss is immensely aggravated by the element of violence involved in it. And where does this violence spring from? From ignorance and hatred — the exact antonyms of Learning and Reason. Learning and Reason: those two words of John Kennedy’s were not uttered in time to save his own life; but every man can pick them up where they fell, and make them part of himself, the seed of that rational intelligence without which our world can no longer survive. This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.
We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind.
Taken from the excellent blog "Brain Pickings," curated by Maria Popova
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https://www.democraticunderground.com/10181546484
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https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/bernsteins-wall-review-leonard-bernstein-1235041678/
It takes you back to a time when the figure of the orchestra conductor was a force in American life.
.... Bernstein was the first American celebrity conductor, the first to attain the kind of prestige associated with European maestros like Herbert von Karajan and Leopold Stokowski. The time was right for him, and he was right for the time — as was clear from the moment of his rocket to fame. It was November 1943, and Bernstein had recently been hired as the assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, a position in which one could slowly drown, since the scheduled conductors tended to never get sick. One day, though, Bruno Walter did. The 25-year-old Bernstein had been up all night partying and had to step in and conduct a 3:00 p.m. concert with no rehearsal. But from the moment he walked onstage at Carnegie Hall to conduct a Schumann overture, the crowd was enraptured. He got a standing ovation, and the concert was reviewed the next day on the front page of The New York Times. ....
Bernstein launched his career as a composer almost simultaneously to his rise as a conductor, and one flaw in “Bernstein’s Wall” is that the documentary takes his identity as a writer of musicals and ballets far too much for granted. The tale it tells of how “West Side Story” came into being is fascinating (Bernstein and Arthur Laurents had shelved the Romeo-and-Juliet-in-the-inner-city idea years before for being too dated; then, while sitting around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, they read reports of the ethnic riots in Los Angeles and instantly saw that it could be done). But how did someone like Bernstein, born in 1918 and steeped in classical rigor, suddenly find the ability to compose songs as fancy free as the ones in “West Side Story”? What popular music was he listening to? (Even Paul McCartney had scores of influences.) We don’t learn a bit about any of this, so the film makes it feel as if “West Side Story” just…happened. ....
“Bernstein’s Wall” tries to frame Leonard Bernstein as a humanitarian who lived for activism as much as he did for music. But to me, at least, a little of his imagine-all-the-people ’70s liberalism goes a long way. It now sounds naïve. (Bernstein in Israel: “It’s just riveting to see Jews and Arabs mingling. I mean, this is what it’s all about, isn’t it?”) And while the film is honest as to how badly Tom Wolfe’s infamous 1970 inside-party portrait “Radical Chic” tainted the Bernsteins, with its scathing portrait of the contradictions of upper bourgeois radicalism, the movie gets a little defensive about it. It winds up siding with Bernstein in suggesting that Wolfe ultimately took a cheap shot (which I don’t believe he did). It’s not that I think Bernstein’s compassion was anything less than real. It’s that his music = compassion homilies were too simplistic to represent the grandeur of what music meant to him.
What the documentary captures, profoundly, is that Leonard Bernstein was a fierce hedonist who worked hard to live the life he wanted. The film closes with a clip of him performing, and simultaneously conducting, the ebullient third movement of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, and the grin on Bernstein’s face is as joyful as anything in the Ode to Joy. Speaking of which, we see him conducting that one in Berlin in 1989, on the day the Berlin Wall fell, and his gravitas on that podium is painfully moving. He would die just one year later, though one of the things I can’t help but wonder is: If Leonard Bernstein had lived in a less repressive society, where he didn’t feel like he had to hide who he was, maybe he wouldn’t have smoked so damn much — and maybe he wouldn’t have died at 72. He packed as much life force into those years as any artist you could name. He wrote some timeless songs, but his ultimate gift was to show us that the life force of art lives inside us too.
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