This Day in Television History (Leonard Bernstein, in Debut as Great Musical Communicator)

November 14, 1954—Eleven years to the day he electrified classical music audiences by appearing for the first time at Carnegie Hall, Leonard Bernstein made a debut of a different kind: as a master music teacher for the television age, on the CBS arts-and-entertainment show Omnibus.

The appearance, in which he led viewers through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, describing the composer’s tortured attempts to come up with just the right notes, capped a year of frenetic activity for the multi-tasking maestro.

At the start of 1954, he temporarily set aside plans to collaborate with Lillian Hellman on a musical adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide—their response to the cultural blight of McCarthyism—to work on an Oscar-nominated score for On the Waterfront, and in the summer he had toiled over Serenade, his “violin concerto” for soloist, string orchestra, harp, and percussion. In the fall, while meeting three or four times a week to discuss Candide, he was also teaching a seminar on musical theater at Brandeis.

That’s when he was approached to do a program on Beethoven by a feature editor for Omnibus, a culture magazine show funded by the Ford Foundation. The show was distinctive in a couple of ways: for what it said about the head of the network on which it appeared, William S. Paley, and for what it demonstrated about the initial optimism spawned by new forms of entertainment.

In David Halberstam's The Powers That Be, Truman Capote noted that the CBS founder “looks like a man who has just swallowed an entire human being.” Part of Paley continually acceded to the lowest common denominator, as in the 1960s, when he seemed bent on stocking his primetime lineup with one dumb-hick show after another (The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and Hee Haw).

But another side of him wanted to make CBS “the Tiffany Network,” a force for socially responsible journalism (Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now) and cultural-enhancing programming. Omnibus, with British journalist Alistair Cooke performing the same urbane host role that he would years later on Masterpiece Theatre, was an example of the latter.

(Nearly 30 years later, Paley sought again to create culturally relevant programming, this time with the CBS Cable network. That effort lasted only one year, compared with the four Omnibus stayed on the mother network’s schedule in the 1950s. (Omnibus moved to ABC and NBC before expiring in 1961.)

Omnibus illustrates both the inherent hazards and lasting triumphs of this kind of programming. In the 20th century, nearly every new medium was hailed for opening up new creative possibilities, only to fall victim to the lure of lucre. During the 1930s, radio brought to the fore the likes of Norman Corwin and the brilliant young Orson Welles. But by the end of the 1940s, Kirk Douglas’ George Phipps character in A Letter to Three Wives, acting as a virtual stand-in for writer-director Joe Mankiewicz, was assailing the purpose of radio writing: “to prove to the masses that a deodorant can bring happiness... a mouth wash guarantee success and a laxative attract romance.”

More recently, cable TV has garnered most of the awards at the Emmys with shows like The Sopranos. But look around all the cable channels these days and answer: how many of these innovative, thought-provoking channels are being put on the schedule versus, say, reality shows?

The situation was far different in 1954. Humphrey Burton’s biography, Leonard Bernstein, notes that his subject instantly seized on the intriguing idea presented by the Omnibus feature editor.

Despite his other commitments, the composer flung himself into the new assignment: writing his own script, sharpening it in consultation with producer Robert Saudek, memorizing lines, practicing all of this plus the extracts of the Fifth Symphony that he would conduct and play on the piano.

It was as exhilarating as anything Bernstein had ever done before—a chance to combine his roles as conductor, pianist, teacher, and himself—the creation of The Leonard Bernstein Brand, if you will—and all broadcast live. He not only had to be good, but perfect.

You can see Bernstein’s 20 minutes of material, broken up into sections, on YouTube. Take a look at this example and you’ll see how the composer wove visuals, startling comparisons, and pitch-perfect performing:

* Bernstein appeared at first as a silhouette in a circular spotlight, surrounded completely by darkness—as effective a dramatic opening on TV as it would be in a theater.

* Dressed in a dark suit and tie, speaking a bit formally, Bernstein livened up his presentation with vivid illustrations. Beethoven, striving for a shocking tone in his Fifth, wanted a “brusque, rude” opening, Bernstein observed, pointing out that a flute was not used because it would intrude “like a delicate lady at a club smoker.”

* To illustrate how Beethoven sought to balance different tones, Bernstein and the producers used musicians standing on a reproduction of the score on the studio floor.

* Demonstrating Beethoven’s relentless, agonized experiments with sounds (this, at a time when the composer was losing his battle with deafness), Bernstein pointed to the composer’s notebook—filled with cramped, overflowing, sometimes illegible handwriting—then contrasted it with a neat specimen from Igor Stravinsky.

Bernstein had taken an all-too-well-known composition and turned it into something fresh and exciting, revealing Beethoven’s multiple roads-not-taken. No more clear and vivid demonstration could be offered of how the finished masterpiece was “built with ferocity and shock.” Only a fellow composer of breathtaking ambition, such as Bernstein himself, could convey to the average viewer what was involved in this titanic inward creative struggle.

That appearance, widely acclaimed, earned Bernstein $3,500—money he could use at this point, since, even though he was now reaching the pinnacle of his career, he was going through the money quickly. He would go on to make several other appearances on Omnibus, explicating, among other matters, Johann Sebastian Bach and the American musical comedy.

Later, over the course of 14 years, Bernstein would also lead 53 Young People’s Concerts. His total achievement in the new medium was enormous: as critic Samuel Lipman wrote, it constituted “the last intellectually sophisticated and successful attempt made to interest and educate today’s vast public in the great masterpieces of the Western musical tradition.”

Bernstein had exposed a whole generation of young viewers to the marvels of classical music, and he represented a colossus in American music, as composer, conductor, pianist, educator and author. Yet all of those activities came to haunt him eventually.

A massive hit to Bernstein’s reputation came when a 1970 fundraiser he and his wife Felicia held for the Black Panthers became the subject of Tom Wolfe’s wickedly funny Radical Chic. Yet I don’t think that book, though it received much attention, wounded Bernstein that much. After all, he could say, that book concerned his political sympathies rather than his creative output.

What really hurt, I think, were two essays written a decade later. Leon Botstein in Harper’s (“The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein,” 1983) and Samuel Lipman in The New Criterion (“Lenny on our Minds,” 1985), while hailing him for his great talent—and his TV lectures—also took him to task for frittering away his energies.

Both Botstein and Lipman criticized his fondness for the grand gesture. Lipman even noted that “his heaven-sent gifts for the electronic communication of high musical art have foundered on the twin shoals of overintellectualization and exaggerated self-promotion.”

Lipman believed that Bernstein fell victim to the particular political climate of the ‘60s, but I think the explanation for Bernstein’s somewhat diminished creativity over the last two decades of his life was much simpler: his increasingly fragile emotional and physical state.

No longer able to suppress his homosexual instincts, Bernstein left his wife for another man. Her death from cancer two years later in 1978 left him with searing guilt, as did the curse she laid on him after he told her of his decision to separate: “You’re going to die a bitter and lonely old man.”
His incessant smoking also caught up with him, and Bernstein died, an exhausted shell, in 1990.
But Bernstein’s multiple roles, far from diminishing his creativity, helped him, I think. His own understanding of a composer’s creative struggles informed his classroom lectures, and the latter in turn made him think through logically parts of his work he had approached unconsciously.

Energy and flamboyance were part and parcel of Bernstein’s egomania, but they underlay the magnetism that made him an ideal communicator of the wonders of classical music. Many reasons have been given in recent years for the decline of classical music, but surely one negative factor is that nobody has emerged to take his place as TV’s great musical educator for a new generation.