This is what a commenter offers to a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Make Our Garden Grow:
“It’s so beautiful,
it makes my heart
want to explode.”
I met Leonard Bernstein only once, at a Christmas concert in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
I was there to recite the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.
Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen
He was there to conduct a bit of Gustav Mahler.
Somehow he wanted to know why I had placed a pause at a particular moment in my reading … and I really had no explanation.
When hearing the climactic final chorus of Bernstein’s Candide, one can imagine how precisely and profoundly its composer had charted the meaning of these words:
We’ll build our house
And chop our wood
And Make Our Garden Grow!
Yet the major ingredient that I would suggest would be simplicity.
Simplicity carved in granite.
The kind you find on the face of another American giant at the Lincoln Monument.
My own efforts at simplicity with the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi were hardly an indication of how I might set those words to music.
It was then I realized how all of life had become music for that great giant within all of American art … within all of world art for that matter.
Leonard Bernstein lived it, breathed it, composed it, lectured on it and … most romantically, conducted it.
He seems never more his complete self than when conducting the climax of Ravel’s La Valse.
Please view the entire video to the very end.
WHEW!!
If you’ll forgive me … and even if you don’t … it seems the orchestra’s entire vocation in life … during those dizzying moments of La Valse … is to bring their conductor, Maestro Bernstein, to the very climactic and, dare I say, orgiastic explosion which the composer had intended to bring the corps of his ballet to.
Ravel described La Valse with the following preface to the score:
“Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees at letter A (within the score) an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo letter B. Set in an imperial court, about 1855.”
Its first choreographer, George Balanchine in 1951 conceived of La Valse as a woman allowing herself to be waltzed to death!!
Clearly the abandon with which Leonard Bernstein throws himself into the work could almost … almost be described as suicidal.
Such shameless courage, in the case of this work particularly, seems not only a necessity but a fit of resolve that only Bernstein could pull off.
By example, the orchestra plays with commensurately homicidal tenacity.
“Murder ’em!” as they say to a cast on Broadway just before a performance.
The sweating brow of Maestro Bernstein, at the end of this exceptional performance, is clearly the fruit of a genius unable to do otherwise.
“Unable to do otherwise” …
In the same soulful surrender, Bernstein gives a detailed analysis of the final movement of Mahler’s 9th Symphony.
He might well be describing his own, possibly grateful surrender to death.
Yes, it was near the end of his life when I met him. He had his little flask of schnapps as a small comfort on this final road to a surrender of his own.
Of all the composers which Bernstein identified with, I do believe it was Gustav Mahler he understood most personally and to whom he was most vulnerable, therefore most tenacious in his love.
Listen to Bernstein confess to Mahler’s failure in the last climactic passage of the 9th Symphony. Is that not the essence of compassion?
One composer discussing another composer, realizing how his own failures, particularly near the end of his life, are to be more profoundly applauded because, indeed, of the courage it takes to even try!!
This next link is a classic video of unparalleled candidness about the Vienna Philharmonic’s own resistance to their own native, Viennese, uncomfortably Jewish composer, Gustav Mahler.
It was, I think, a sign of Bernstein’s own, profoundly clear understanding of the measure of things … Mahler is NOT among the most admired of composers within the Musicati!
Neither was Bernstein while he lived.
So, “If you love me, you must love Mahler!”
Did Mahler know there would be a Bernstein to translate him … or, as one commenter smugly adds, to “invent” Mahler for the Vienna Philharmonic?
With Mahler, politely known as a member of the Late Romantic School, already branded as behind the revolutionaries erupting out of Fin de Siecle Vienna who but Bernstein could have the patience, compassion and, yes, courage to bring Mahler back into the hardened prejudices of late 20th Century Vienna itself?
Leonard Bernstein knew the patronizing concessions to his Renaissance vision of life made by similarly “enlightened despots” in America.
In sharing not just part of himself, but all of himself, more than willing, if need be, to sweat blood itself, Leonard Bernstein knew that combining his musical accomplishments, both conducting and composing, with his considerable teaching talents, his passion to share the insights his own genius had led him to, his memory would, without any doubt at all, rest among Life’s greatest musical legends.
Bach, Beethoven and Mozart have an unquestionable peer in the Romantically Renaissance soul and timeless achievements of Leonard Bernstein.
Can you hear the critics, the “enlightened despots” scoffing?
Most of them have initially crowded around President Barack Obama as if he were a God!!!!!
And, tragically perhaps, Leonard Bernstein might have been one of them.
However, my small chance to have met, if only briefly, an equivalent of human divinity, a virtual angel of music, is, indeed, a privilege few have been afforded, indeed, a more than Ordinary Miracle.
In light of St. Francis and the final movement to Mahler’s 9th, no one knew the meaning of prayer more profoundly than Leonard Bernstein. His references to the “sacred” in his earlier comments upon the Vienna Philharmonic are central to his understanding of life as a whole.
Finally, no artist ever allowed his muses to waltz him into death more lustfully nor more lovingly than Leonard Bernstein.
If there was, indeed, a “holy vessel”, as Bernstein referred to Mahler, that sacred truth bringer was Leonard Bernstein himself.
As for Bernstein’s own personal and outré waltz around the Radical Chic?
My own ordinary miracle of a lawyer, Arnold Weissberger,was among that crowd.
I spent ten years straight as a drunk in Canada.
Who am I to condemn such an irresistible genius?
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.