A surreal encounter with Leonard Bernstein

The music great passed away 34 years ago today, on October 14

Bernstein (l), Alfred (r) and your humble correspondent (Aug. 4, 1979)

All journalists have some story about how they ended up in this predicament. Mine involves the music great Leonard Bernstein, who passed on this day 34 years ago, after a long life of amazing successes as a composer, conductor, pianist, and gentle rabble-rouser.

The setting was the Robin Hood Dell West, an open-air amphitheater in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park which offered all kinds of concerts in idyllic tree-lined surroundings named after the coolest of English criminals. My parents dragged me there in hopes of igniting a  love of classical music. As they were Romanian Jewish immigrants, this goal was attached somehow to the wider aspiration that I should grow up to be, if not a medical doctor, then at least an engineer. Little did they know what disappointments lay in wait.

It was the August of 1979, and I had just discovered what is now called classic rock. Some was already “old” – such as the songs of the Beatles, introduced to me by my friend Dave. But this was a time when you’d turn on the radio and hear instant classics like “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty or Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” Sorry to be predictable, but today’s youth have no idea what it means to grow up in such an era. I digress.

The symphonies, concertos and canons at the Dell did not similarly grab me. Obviously there are great ones, and I knew it even then due to piano lessons, but overall I was bored with the absence of lyrics or driving beat, and also, I believe, by the fact that that this was (forgive me) largely performance and not creation. I could have sworn my father felt the same, sitting there in the heat, but my mother was for once happy and he dared not mess that up.

I did like one thing, though: the conductor was a major celebrity, and not just for nerds. Leonard Berstein had composed West Side Story, a major hit the previous decade, and he was also known for stirring up all kinds of mischief, like with his 1970 fundraiser for the Black Panthers, the "Radical Chic" event that attracted widespread controversy among elite Manhattan society. He was also gay-adjacent too, which was edgy as hell back then.

There was an action point, because I was active in my high school’s closed-circuit TV studio in the Upper Merion county of the endless Philly suburbs. My friend Alfred and I produced a “show” aired in the school called “16 Minutes” (no budget for 60, went the joke), and as I sat there listening to the miserable string section and watching Bernstein leap about and point his baton, I decided he would be an ideal interview subject to round out our usual offering of the high school teachers and the 11^th-grade tough guys at the Halloween fair.

So after the performance, encouraged by my mother, I approached Bernstein on the stage; this was possible then without getting shot. He seemed as old as the hills – and in fact was exactly my age today. With hardly a word he shunted me on to an assistant hovering nearby. After some persistence from me this nervous fellow, a birdlike man, chirped something like “come by tomorrow at rehearsal.” In any case that’s what I chose to hear.

The next day my mother, delighted with what she believed was her success on the classical music front, drove Alfred and me back to the Robin Hood Dell West (which has by now, sadly, been renamed the “Mann Music Center”). Bernstein was again jumping around, this time in jeans and an untucked white shirt, but still terrorizing the orchestra with his little stick. After the rehearsal we proceeded unimpeded to the dressing room area in the back of the stage, carting with us a massive TV camera connected to an equally weighty recorder – a setup absurdly called a “portapak.”

The “portapak” — early version of the smartphone camera

The assistant was there, even more nervous even than before, engineering the entry and exit of various groups of sycophants into the great man’s little room. Occasionally one heard loud laughter, but mostly murmurs and strange silence.  We waited a good half hour. The nervous man, I think, expected us to give up and go away.

Finally the room was cleared of every other conceivable courtier, and yet we stubbornly remained, to the obvious dismay of the birdlike man. He said something about Bernstein being tired. We said something about needing just a few minutes of his precious time. The man threw up his arms in exasperation and poked his head in the door. “Mr. Bernstein… the boys from Merion are here...”

A moment of nervous silence – and then a growl from the master: “Let them in, let them in, by all means.”

We shuffled into the room, dragging the TV equipment awkwardly enough. It was clear I’d do the interview, as I had engineered this minor miracle. Alfred fiddled with the cables and adjusted the focus and tended to all such things with minor fuss and much aplomb – one must give him that. Bernstein invited me to sit next to him – and we were off.

In the video, which now resides on YouTube,  you can hear the excitement in my voice as I tried to nonchalantly explain to the Philly highschoolers that “I'm talking to the distinguished Mr. Leonard Bernstein.” I was in awe, perhaps, but not that much in awe. I decided to throw him off balance by starting with the hardest possible question: “Of the different facets of your career as composer, conductor, and pianist, what do you find the most challenging?”

Bernstein met this thrust with the most unruffled possible parry. “All of them, I must say,” he indeed said. “And what is most challenging is dividing one's time so that one can do them all. I suppose what gives one the most lasting reward, inner reward, is composing.”

I realized I was dealing with a master not just of music. He had contradicted himself, and yet left me grateful for having coaxed a choice. Moreover, it was a choice I could respect – remember my barely restrained disdain, a few paragraphs above, at the value of performance versus creation. It was as if he’d read my mind.

Gathering myself, I realized I had an opening for the hardest question of all – the kind of direct salvo that would decimate many an interview subject awaiting in my future: “Of your different compositions, which one did you find the most rewarding?”

Again, Bernstein swatted away the question like an especially trivial fly, but he did it with grace and style: “Well, that's very hard to say. That's like asking me which of my children I love the best.” Hard to say? Impossible to say? Does he have a favorite child? I was too vexed to go any further down this minefield. So I tried another approach.

“You've traveled all over the world. How would you compare the youth in the United States to that in different countries, different continents, such as Europe, in terms of knowledge of classical music?”

“Well, that depends which countries you're talking about,” he said. “In Japan, for example, there's a tremendous conversance with serious music among the youth.” There it was – the chance for a headline! Surely he will admit that no such “conversance” was “tremendous” among our own youth at home. “Do you find the youth is less enthusiastic here in the United States?” I demanded.

But Bernstein simply ignored the question – a technique I now know as deflection – proceeding with his previous line of thought. “They save up all year to buy very expensive tickets …  because I've just come from Japan. I couldn't get over the number of 19-year-olds and 20-year-olds who are paying $60 a ticket!” This left me scrambling for another way to ask the same question, which is rarely good form. I came up with this: “You've conducted in Philadelphia before. How do you like the audiences here?”

The great man regarded me as one regards a person who prefers Salieri to Mozart.

“Oh, they're wonderful,” he said. He uttered these words with the dryness of the Sahara – yet coming from this man they sounded lyrical in some way.

“All right,” I concluded. There was not much more to say.

I knew it wasn’t the world’s greatest interview. But I also knew that if I were still around in 2024, I would be retelling the story still. That’s when I started to suspect that I would neither a doctor nor engineer be. For what is a journalist, but a person who tells a story?

16 Minutes control room