The political life of Leonard Bernstein
A review of Barry Seldes’ Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician
What Seldes must prove, rather, is that Bernstein’s politics should matter to us. For if Bernstein was known as a famous liberal, he is also widely remembered as a fatuous one.
I was not of voting age when most of the political events happened that are detailed in this book. I’ve also got a non-adult sense of Reagan. I met him when he visited my high school in Pasadena when he was governor. He was very tall and wore a brown suit. That’s all I knew of Reagan when he was running for president. This book may be a good read for me, however skewed the author’s views are. I’m grateful for reviews like this that offer another perspective. Here’s a long quote from the end of the review:
And the major thesis of Seldes’ book is that Bernstein’s ultimate failure to produce a great opera or symphony—a failure that haunted his last years—can be attributed to the failure of progressive politics in America. It is in support of this argument that Seldes stirs great undigested chunks of political history into the book: “According to Reagan, government was the real domestic enemy, whereas liberals and progressives argued that his outlook was a cover for proposals to grant tax relief to those in the higher earning brackets and to cut social spending while increasing defense spending.”
Yet Seldes overreaches when he concludes that “Bernstein’s compositional frustration had its roots more in the evolving American social fabric … than in his supposedly limited talents, his idiosyncrasies, his habits, and his psychological dispositions.” … There is, in fact, something rather silly in Seldes’s suggestion that America let Bernstein down by voting for Ronald Reagan. If … Stravinsky…could keep composing through two world wars, surely a composer of similar stature could find a way to flourish in the much less adverse conditions of late-20th-century America. It follows pretty clearly that Bernstein was not a composer of that stature, just as he was not a political thinker or activist of lasting interest. Somewhere between Wolfe’s mockery and Seldes’s reverence lies the affection that Bernstein’s achievement, and his memory, actually deserve.
