On his book Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician
Cover Interview of October 06, 2009
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 dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
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.