Rorotoko

In a nutshell

I want my readers to understand Leonard Bernstein as a person whose political life was intimately bound up with his artistic life.

I was inspired to begin writing this book in 1995, when the FBI’s dossier on Bernstein became accessible under the Freedom of Information Act. To that date, only about five of this dossier’s many hundreds of pages had been published or made use of by biographers. Using these materials in conjunction with Bernstein’s correspondence and other papers that became available at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., I have written an account of Bernstein’s life that deepens considerably our understanding of this iconic figure.

I set out to document Bernstein’s extraordinary engagement with leftwing politics to a degree far surpassing what other biographers have covered. I go on to document, among others, his tribulations during the 1940s and 1950s blacklist era; his recuperation via the so-called Cultural Cold War; his ascension to the musical directorship of the New York Philharmonic; his political work in the anti-Vietnam War, civil rights, and gay rights movements; his political and social philosophy. I then explain how all of these found connection, if not expression, in Bernstein’s compositions, and in his championing of the works of Gustav Mahler.

Focusing on interconnections between politics and culture, I try to indicate why Bernstein, up to his dying day, remained frustrated in his hopes to compose a work of great political significance.

The wide angle

My interests in cultural politics include a project I had started before the Bernstein project—a study of the joint work by the Soviet artists Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky, their 1923 book, For the Voice. My emphasis here was especially on Lissitzky’s design for Mayakovsky’s poem, “And You?”

Radically different as the Bernstein work is from this earlier project, both projects trace how the work and sensibilities of creative artists are composed and conditioned by cultural and political milieu.

In my book, I also refer to Bernstein’s contemporaries in theater and fiction—e.g., Saul Bellow, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer. The idea was to understand how that generation acted within their situation. Of course, the sensibilities of these artists are not reducible to that situation: each one was carrying out his own project.

To understand Bernstein’s project, I went back into his formative years at Harvard. Bernstein met with, among others, Copland, Serge Koussevitzky, Mark Blitzstein. He later collaborated with Jerome Robbins and with Lillian Hellman, and, in the early period leading up to his Mass, with Daniel Berrigan. In all these endeavors, Bernstein was composing works that responded to the political and moral climate. In the last decades of his life, Bernstein hoped to compose a work of operatic or hybrid form that would bring his fellow citizens back to the ethical-political outlook that they professed in the abstract but against which they acted in concrete situations.

In short, Bernstein sought for a form of art in which to indicate his countrymen’s bad faith.

In the last decades of his life, Bernstein hoped to compose a work of operatic or hybrid form that would bring his fellow citizens back to the ethical-political outlook that they professed in the abstract but against which they acted in concrete situations.