Stephen Walsh

Did Leonard Bernstein do too much to be a great artist?

The composer sent "I love you"s to just about everyone, as The Leonard Bernstein Letters reveal

Leonard Bernstein in 1945. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 16 November 2013

Nigel Simeone’s title for his edition of Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence rings compellingly, novellistically, through the force of the definite article, as in The Aspern Papers, or The Scarlet Letter. The reality, though, is more diffuse. Bernstein was a man of enormous endowments. One correspondent, after listing his talents as a composer, orchestrator, pianist, conductor, lecturer and general all-round musical functionary, ends by enquiring ironically, ‘Can you cook?’

The list might have been extended. It could have included a wild diversity of sexual activity, a seemingly limitless gift for affection and friendship, an inexhaustible capacity for work, and a genius for self-promotion. What it could hardly have included was focus. ‘Is your mission in life,’ one old friend demands pettishly, ‘to be the greatest of all dilettantes?’ Bernstein himself discovers later on from ‘an old book of Chinese divination that my problem is one of self-limitation’. The Chinese, as usual, were right.

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