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Bernstein challenges
singers—pushes us to use
our heads
,
our intellects
as well as our raw talent.
His music stickswithyou
.
It’s something you can’t forget.
–Nadine SIerra
“
Leonard Bernstein and Barbra Streisand at the “Broadway for Peace” concert.
special and album,
My Name is Barbra
(transposed from the
original “Barbara”). Bernstein and Streisand subsequently
reconnected over the song “So Pretty,” written for the
“Broadway for Peace” concert.]
Years before writing
I Hate Music
, Bernstein applied himself
to
Psalm
.
“It’s the earliest song of his I could nd, from
,”
says Murphy. “It’s for voice and piano—a serious song. You can
hear the deep qualities of his expression that you know from his
later music, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it was Bernstein.”
e young Bernstein wrote
Psalm
at the beginning of his -
nal year at Boston Latin School. It sounds Robert Schumannish,
with some Wagner harmonies, “and I think you can hear some
threads of Mahler in some of his earlier songs,” says Murphy.
Although the young Bernstein pored over classical piano
pieces, his knowledge of American jazz and popular music
came to rival that of Gershwin, that quintessential crossover
artist. He grew up during the golden age of radio and heard
plenty of American popular song, but it was his playing in jazz
bands that made him so uent in American idioms. His father
was indirectly responsible for that. For a time, Sam Bernstein
was neither nancially nor emotionally supportive of his son’s
musical dreams. “[My father’s] concept of a professional mu-
sician, which he’d brought with him from the Russian ghetto,
was of a
klezmer,
which is little better than a beggar, a guy with
a clarinet or a violin going from town to town to play for a few
kopecks at weddings and bar mitzvahs.”
To make money to pay for his musical studies, Bernstein
hit the stage. “Playing in jazz bands lled me with a new kind
of knowledge of popular music and black music that was far
beyond anything I knew from the radio … and it became part
of my musical bloodstream as had Chopin and Tchaikovsky. It
was a big hardship but such fun because it made me indepen-
dent of my father.”
D
espite her youth
, having been born in
,
soprano Nadine Sierra has a long history with Bern-
stein. “My connection with him started when I was
years old. I was always looking for music to learn
because I was completely insatiable. So at I started learning
theater and his more famous orchestral pieces,” Murphy says.
“It’s a lot of fun in this centennial year to explore the music that
people aren’t used to hearing. I’m excited for this opportunity
to dig into his repertoire. I knew
I Hate Music
early in my ca-
reer, but I didn’t really know that many other Bernstein songs.”
I Hate Music
is a cycle of ve songs composed in
, when
Bernstein shared a at with artist Edys Merrill. e quirky,
ironic title was inspired by Merrill, who o en walked around
the apartment with her hands over her ears, shouting “
” while Bernstein coached opera singers.
Bernstein based the cycle on ve short children’s poems that
he wrote himself. With the music, he published a cautionary
statement for the singers: “In the performance of these songs,
coyness is to be assiduously avoided. e natural, unforced
sweetness of child expressions can never be successfully gilded;
rather will it come through the music in proportion to the dig-
nity and sophisticated understanding of the singer.” [Few have
achieved this delicate balance as well as Barbra Streisand, who
used the cycle’s rst song as the title piece of her
television
MERRI CYR (SIERRA); ELLIOTT LANDY/COURTESY OF THE LEONARD BERNSTEIN OFFICE (BERNSTEIN/STREISAND);
WILLIAM GOTTLIEB/COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (OPPOSITE PAGE)
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 6 – AUGUST 19, 2018
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