Ravinia 2019, Issue 4, Week 7

JULY 15 – JULY 28, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 37 By John Schauer A number of years ago, when I was still working at Ravinia Festival, there was one memorable a ernoon when Ravin- ia President and CEO Welz Kau man regaled a few of us with anecdotes about the summer he spent at Tan- glewood’s summer training program during the time when Leonard Bernstein was teaching and conducting there. I struggled to suppress the full-blown envy I felt of some- one who had actually spoken and studied with an icon who loomed so enormously in my personal music pantheon when I was growing up. In fact, I credit Bernstein with my early decision to pursue studies in musicology, although his in uence was indi- rect—to put it mildly. Growing up exposed to Ber- nstein’s Young People’s Concerts, I came to think of him as the ultimate authority on all things musical, a conductor whose recordings represented the nal word on any masterpiece. So when, at the tender age of , I became interested in acquiring a recording of Handel’s Messiah , I naturally gravitated to the one Bernstein had made only two years earlier. I played it incessantly and decided that Messi- ah was the greatest piece of music ever composed. A friend who was one of the only other classical music geeks I knew coinciden- tally got a di erent recording of Messiah around that time, and we began making comparisons. I was totally jolted when my friend discussed a chorus that wasn’t on my recording; it had never occurred to me that someone could record and mar- ket a performance that wasn’t complete. It became my mission to nd out what was missing. A er examining a copy of the score from the public library, the abandon with which Bernstein had wielded his knife shocked me: nearly one-third of the entire work had been cut. I was outraged, and with the indignation only a preteen can muster, I concocted my own Ten Com- mandments of Music, rst of which was the dictum that music must always be performed absolutely complete. My piano teacher thought it was cute and suggested that I ought to consider becoming a musi- cologist, a word I had never heard before. I took her suggestion seriously and ultimately invested eight years of my life in college and grad school pursuing the topic. But it wasn’t totally in vain, and the rst time I was able to make use of my education was a er I got a job as a jour- nalist and began writing music criticism. Reviewing records was a sweet deal be- cause I got tons of free albums, something I could never get enough of. Among the bounty I received was a massive -LP set of e Unanswered Question , a series of six lectures Bernstein delivered at Har- vard in on the destiny of music. is was heavy stu he was discussing, light years beyond those Young People’s Concerts, and I rather impertinent- ly dared to write a detailed review of the series and then—get this—send the published review to Bernstein himself, along with an interview request. To show the degree of my audacity, my review, which was essentially a rave, took exception to a number of Bernstein’s points and said such things as, “He confuses triadic harmony with tonal harmo- ny,” “It is unfortunate that he neither de nes nor explains the phenomena of consonance and dissonance,” or “ e slickness of his presentation distracts the listener from any con- trary evidence.” e magnitude of my youthful impudence causes me to blush as I write this. You might not be surprised to learn that he turned down my interview request, but he did so in such a gracious way as to make the rejection an a rmative experience. In a touchingly kind letter, he said he had read my review “with great interest” but wasn’t doing interviews because of “that old devil, time.” I chose to believe him. Of course I never knew if he had ac- tually read my review. But then, he never knew that I was in a position to write that review—or that I had pursued musicol- ogy in the rst place—primarily because of one of his recordings. I think he would have been pleased. John Schauer is a freelance writer whose life’s work will be forgotten many decades before Bernstein’s—to put it mildly. at Old Devil, Time J L 2 , 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE