Learning at the hands of a master

Bernstein's genius lives on in CDs and DVDs

Leonard Bernstein appearing in one of his Young People's Concerts on CBS. (CBS)

How do you begin to celebrate the 90th birthday of a man who did everything in music? Well, we're a consumer society and there's lots of new Lenny-ana to consume. There's that five-DVD set of Leonard Bernstein conducting in the '70s and '80s. The seven DVDs of his sparkling Beethoven symphonies are scheduled to be released next month. How about the 10-CD box of Bernstein conducting his own works on Sony, complete with all the nostalgia that comes with that label's "Original Jacket Collection" series? There's the beautiful book edited by his brother, the revival of "West Side Story" in D.C., the two-month celebration of him in New York. . .

OK, all of these are worthwhile, even musts for the I Love Lenny club, of which I'm a proud member. But they're not where I would start. That's not, in fact, where I did start. That would be in my familiar pose as a 7-year-old - in front of a television set. My father was not an assertive man, but he did commandeer the television set at 5 p.m. Sunday for "Omnibus," the high-toned cultural show on CBS hosted by Alistair Cooke. This being 1954, there was only one television set in the house and if I was going to watch TV it was going to be this Leonard Bernstein guy explaining how Ludwig van Beethoven wrote the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Yuck.

But wait a moment, I thought, this show doesn't look half bad. What was that on the floor of the studio? It was the first page of the score. Bernstein pointed with his shoe to the opening notes and said in his Harvard-inflected smooth tones, "Three Gs and an E flat" and proceeded to show how the movement grew from there, with Beethoven discarding ideas that anyone else would have readily accepted.

'Young People's Concerts'

Bernstein had his own genius. Debates will continue about whether he was a great composer and conductor. Eyes will roll over his "radical chic" party for the Black Panthers as well as those silly-looking ascots he took to in later life. But very few observers question his greatness as an educator, whether educating a whole generation of baby boomers on television or coaxing more insightful performances out of his players.

Of course what Bernstein is most famous for in this vein are "The Young People's Concerts" and there's a nine-CD, 25-program set on Kultur. These probably don't sit as well with today's younger generation as they did with enthralled boomers - the grainy black and white early shows might be a turnoff and the references that seemed so hip then, such as using the Beatles' "And I Love Her" to demonstrate "What Is Sonata Form," might elicit only shrugs now.

But if they're lost on the young, they're actually fascinating stuff for adults. Bernstein knew how to speak entertainingly to the camera and so there is nothing dry or didactic about any of the subjects, even "Musical Atoms: A Study of Intervals."

Entertainment isn't the point. The real meat of these shows is the way he demonstrates how classical music has the ability to move us so deeply.

Or how music of all kind has that ability. One of the best shows, from 1966, is "What Is a Mode?" which draws on everything from Debussy's "Fetes" and Beethoven's Fifth, to "Hanky-Panky," "You Really Got Me," and "Norwegian Wood."

Still, while the "Young People's Concerts" are the most famous, they're only the beginning. (Even before those telecasts, he made a series of recordings for American Decca with erudite analyses and complete performances of Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky re-released by Deutsche Grammophon.)

Shakespeare and blues

The "Omnibus" videos are still unavailable, but many of Bernstein's more "adult" lectures, from that show and elsewhere, are available on Sony CDs. One of the best is "Bernstein on Jazz," which features extended collaborations with Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck (in a composition by his brother, Howard). Also on the CD is "What Is Jazz," a great dissection by Bernstein about jazz and blues, demonstrating among other things why opera singers are so often bad interpreters of popular music.

The highlight, though, is Bernstein's discussion of jazz form, in which he shows how blues songs are composed in iambic pentameter and, conversely, how any Shakespeare rhymed couplet can be turned into a blues song. His example, complete with the famous Bernstein croak and jazz accompaniment in the background:

"I will not be afraid of death and bane,

I said I will not be afraid of death and bane,

Till Burnam Forest come to Dunsinane."

I was not in front of the television set when WGBH telecast "The Unanswered Question" in 1973. These were Bernstein's Norton Lectures at Harvard in which he tried to use Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories to develop a grammar for music.

Fortunately, Kultur has made those six lectures available on DVD. Bernstein's ultimate point, which was at the other end of the pole from radical chic, was that while atonality was an interesting sidelight to classical music, it broke too many "grammatical" rules, leaving classical music in turmoil. He anointed Stravinsky, not Schoenberg, king of the hill.

If you get lost in the first three lectures - his musical parsing does get dense - skip to the last three, which has more Mahler and less Chomsky.

By this time Bernstein had left the Philharmonic and, shortly afterward, Columbia Records (now Sony). He revisited much of the traditional repertory, mostly with the Vienna Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon. He also started filming the concerts with Boswellian biographer Humphrey Burton directing. DG has released sumptuous DVD packages of his Brahms and Mahler performances, along with the Beethoven, and Medici Arts is also active in getting the archival material out on DVD. Bernstein was not only at the top of his game on the podium in the Beethoven and Mahler, but he added spoken commentaries that are included in the DVD sets.

There's also a separate DG documentary he made for the BBC in 1985, "The Little Drummer Boy," in which Bernstein casts Mahler's music in terms of a man caught between two worlds - the German-Austrian tradition ranging from Bach to Brahms and Schumann, with its hope of Christian resurrection and afterlife, and his own Jewish earthy and earth-bound roots. A stretch? Everything Bernstein did was a stretch, from his bohemian rabbi persona to those Lenny leaps on the podium, as if he could will himself and the orchestra to reach heights that they wouldn't otherwise try to scale.

Kisses on the hand

One other bonus in this wealth of DVD releases is the opportunity to see Bernstein in rehearsal. There's the famous scene, included in the Mahler box, of him explaining the composer to the Vienna Philharmonic, which had been banned from playing Mahler during the Nazi era.

But the one that stays with me is on a Medici Arts DVD of Bernstein rehearsing and conducting Shostakovich's First Symphony at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival with the international youth orchestra he founded. Explaining the symphony to them as an anti-authoritarian work by "a naughty boy," he makes it clear that music is more than just playing notes. "Surprise us, come on," he says to a young woman, "You're not a shy girl, are you, by nature?" At the end of the concert he brings her up out of her chair and kisses her hand for a lesson learned.

If there is a Mahlerian afterlife, he's probably still lecturing, still coaxing. Maybe trying to get Gustav to fast for Yom Kippur. Or talking to an even higher authority:

God: You know, that third symphony of yours where you're hectoring me, is really pretty awful.

Lenny: Yeah, look who's talking. Every one's a critic. Not everything you did turned out so great, either, you know.

But we'll have to be satisfied with what he said while he was here. And that was plenty. And plenty good.