Ravinia 2019, Issue 6, Week 12

Above: An aerial view of Ravinia and its surrounding neighborhood in Highland Park, circa 1930 Inset: Leonard Bernstein would have found Ravinia much different from today at the time of his simultaneous debuts at the festival and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra 75 years ago. Only the Martin Theatre (bottom left) still stands, with a new Pavilion (top) having been built over 1949–50 and the Casino Building (bottom right) replaced by the Harza Building in 1988 to house Bennett Gordon Hall and Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute. Bernstein’s experience at Ravinia and its hometown of Highland Park in 1944 and 1945 led to him naming the city among suburban paradises in the libretto of Trouble in Tahiti less than a decade later. While conducting his landmark research on the use of hallucinogenic drugs for psychother- apeutic treatment, Timothy Leary established the concept of “set and setting,” by which he meant that the two most important factors determining the results achieved were the mindset of the individual being treated and the physical environment in which the treatment was administered. While there is nothing psychedelic about the one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti by Leonard Bernstein— who famously expressed his disapproval of LSD in his talk “Berlioz Takes a Trip!” using the story of the Symphonie Fantastique to make his point—set and setting are important factors in consid- ering the genesis of his opera. While still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, Bernstein reportedly expressed his desire to marry and have children to fellow student Phyllis Moss. “That was his dream,” she later recalled. “He was obsessed with that.” And in 1951, he did marry aspiring actress Feli- cia Montealegre, with whom he would have three children. [The eldest, Jamie, will join conductor Marin Alsop for a discussion of Trouble in Tahiti ’s place in Bernstein’s personal life and musical canon in between the Ravinia-premiere performances of the jazzed-up one-act on August 22. Visit Ravinia.org for more details.] Multiple commentators have pointed out the incongruity of Bernstein (who wrote his own libretto for Trouble in Tahiti ) creating such an unflinching dissection of a failed marriage while he was on his honeymoon. But although his own mar- riage was challenged by the inner conflicts Bernstein struggled with concerning his sexuality, the couple’s affection for each other was by all accounts genuine. Shortly after their marriage, Felicia wrote to him that she didn’t consider his sexual orienta- tion an insurmountable obstacle, stating, “Our marriage is not based on passion but on tenderness and mutual respect.” Yet only a few years before that, according to psychiatrist Lawrence St. Clair, “Bernstein told his therapist, Renée Nell, that he had a great fear of being trapped in a dull marriage and leading a middle-class life,” a fear that sprang from observing his own parents. As his sister, Shirley, stated in an oral history for the Bernstein Foundation, “My mother and father were mismated, mismatched, both interesting and good people who should never have been married. …They were never in love with each other, unfortunately.” Indeed, Bernstein originally gave his opera’s protagonists his parents’ names, Sam and Jen- nie, but later changed Jennie to Dinah, the name of his paternal grandmother, which he considered more singable. If Bernstein’s mindset while composing his opera can be easily traced to his own childhood experiences, it is the set- ting—American suburbia of the early 1950s—that makes the work’s brutal honesty astonishing. The opera premiered in 1952, during the first flush of a period that, in retrospect, can seem seductively and deceptively innocent and euphoric. It was the year Elizabeth II ascended the throne of England and Dwight Eisenhower was elected president. The greatest horror of all history, the Second World War, had ended a mere seven years earlier. Some 16 million Ameri- cans served in the war, more than 10 percent of the total popu- lation, and their return launched an unprecedented expansion RAVINIA ARCHIVE PHOTO AUGUST 12 – AUGUST 25, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 31