“I am not happy unless I can compose.” There is no self-pity in Leonard Bernstein’s cry for happiness, only despair that so much has to be expressed in so many ways in so short a time. Within minutes of his arrival, the commitments have come crowding in. When you are as versatile as Bernstein, the detailed organisation of your different activities becomes as much of a nightmare as their execution.



“It is absurd,” he admits, “that I am permanent conductor of a major symphony orchestra.” He has been with the New York Philharmonic for 10 years now, and that alone would be a full-time job for most conductors, for the American concept of permanent conductorship is far more taxing than the European. Even the appointment of William Steinberg to be “Permanent Guest Conductor” (splendid title) has not lightened Bernstein’s burden. He still conducts sequences of five performances of the same Philharmonic concert throughout the season, and on top of that is a uniquely effective expounder of music to the widest public through his regular television programme.

Yet still composing is an essential. Very practically, he took a sabbatical year in 1965, not so much to rest (how could such a man do that?) as to have leisure to compose. He intended to write another work for the stage – “Call it opera, call it musical” – but after six months he realised the music was not achieving what he wanted it to do. It was then too late to conceive and write another opera in the remaining six months before engagements crowded in once more. “Don’t talk to me about writing stage works,” he pleaded. “It makes me very sad.”

Leonard Bernstein, February 1963. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer

Yet plainly the germs are there of more stage works from the man who wrote “West Side Story.” The musical stage, he feels, provides the most exciting opportunities for musical development, and whatever the obstacles for him, it is plain that he intends to be in on that development. As he said in a recent article in the “New York Times” he is committed to tonality as a composer, but that does not prevent him from complimenting the work of Boulez and Lukas Foss.

The ability to see both sides of the issue (“it is a Hamlet-like torture to be truly liberal”) continually illuminates his conversation. Here is a man, apparently an extreme extrovert, who delights in the glamour of conducting a full symphony orchestra, of directing large-scale works, the bigger the better, yet who still has extreme curiosity about the feelings and reactions of those around him.

I tackled him on one of his less successful records, in which he performs this double function of pianist and conductor, Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. Why, I asked, did he play his solos in the slow movement at quite a different speed from the tempo he had set for the concerted passages? He did his best to justify it. The piano, he contended, “takes more time to sing out” than the orchestra. He noted the same discrepancy in a recording he made only a week or so back in Vienna – Mozart’s B flat Piano Concerto, K450. He was worried at first by the changes of tempo as they grew more extreme; then realised that that was indeed what he intended.

That particular performance was conceived in that way, but he emphasised that no two performances should ever be identical. In that very concerto his recorded performance was overtly romantic with plenty of pedal, but when he went to Monte Carlo to play in a comparatively intimate hall he found himself using next to no pedal, none at all in one movement, and the result was more classical.

Leonard Bernstein during rehearsals at London’s Royal Albert Hall for the Igor Stravinsky Memorial Concert, 1972. Photograph: PA/EMPICS

Sometimes, he admitted, a recording session doesn’t go [well], “and then you have to piece many bits together.” He conceded that maybe the Beethoven First record I disliked had been made up from too many tapes. It wasn’t a real performance. On the other hand, the disjointed technique inevitable in recording complete operas did not prevent a “real performance” in the end. He has just finished recording Verdi’s Falstaff in Vienna with Fischer-Dieskau for CBS (following his direction of Visconti’s production at the Vienna State Opera) and that, he had instinctively felt throughout the sessions, would be a real, coordinated performance.

Now in London, beginning next week after the Royal Albert Hall performance on Sunday, he is going to record Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.” It is partly a compliment to the LSO (also partly economic necessity) that he is doing it on this side of the Atlantic. He is looking forward with relief to conducting in English again after his six weeks in Vienna. The names of notes are so difficult in German, he complained, but it is hard to believe that anything is difficult for Leonard Bernstein. Not even crossword puzzles, He likes the one in the “Manchester Guardian Weekly” which he does regularly. An excellent point, he says, having consistent themes running through the clues. But one wonders how he ever finds time to do it.