The Leonard Bernstein Letters (3 page)

19 Leonard Bernstein with Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins working on
West Side Story
.

20 Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins being presented with the Key to Washington D.C. by Commissioner Robert E. McLaughlin, 31 August 1957.

21 Leonard and Burton Bernstein skiing in 1958.

22 Felicia Bernstein as Joan in Honegger's
Joan of Arc at the Stake
, 1958.

23 Lukas Foss

24 Sid Ramin, on the back cover of his LP
Love is a Swinging Word
(RCA Victor, released in 1959). To the right of Ramin's photo is an endorsement by Bernstein: “I have known Sid Ramin since we were both thirteen. I was impressed with his great musicality then, and have continued to be more and more impressed ever since. His work with me (and Irv Kostal) on
West Side Story
was invaluable – sensitive, strong, and facile. Long may he wave!”

25 Leonard and Felicia Bernstein with Boris Pasternak, Moscow, 1959.

26 Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland with the score of
El Salón México
, c. 1960.

27 Leonard Bernstein at the MacDowell Colony in 1962, working on
Kaddish
.

28 Leonard Bernstein: canon written for Humphrey Burton and Erik Smith, 25 March 1977. The text reads: “Humphrey Burton is forty-six, so is Erik Smith. Erik Smith is forty-six, so is Humphrey Burton.” Burton recalls the occasion on which it was written: “We dined with LB at the Garrick Club, which is where he produced his composition and we all lustily joined in an impromptu performance, so far as I am aware never repeated”.

29 Jacqueline Kennedy with Leonard and Felicia Bernstein and their children Alexander and Jamie at the Theatre De Lys, New York, on 28 June 1965. The occasion was the opening night of
Leonard Bernstein's Theatre Songs
, a revue featuring songs from shows for which Bernstein composed the music.

Introduction and Acknowledgments

The Beginning of the Project

In early 2010, just after finishing a book about
West Side Story
, I was in the Performing Arts Reading Room at the Library of Congress, talking to Mark Horowitz about possible future projects. Mark's position as a Senior Music Specialist in the Music Division includes responsibility for the Leonard Bernstein Collection – so he knows this enormous archive better than anyone. In the course of one of our frequent chats, Mark made an apparently straightforward suggestion: “Why don't you do a book of the correspondence?” Those words lodged in my mind and the idea quickly began to take root.

One reason
not
to do the letters was their sheer bulk: many tens of thousands of them, grouped in different series: Personal Correspondence, Writings (which include few but wonderful letters), Fan Mail, and Business Papers – taking up hundreds of linear feet. But the temptation of working with Bernstein's correspondence was far too exciting a challenge to let these statistics – however daunting – get in the way. Betty Comden wrote to Bernstein back in 1950 about how he saved “every scrap of correspondence […] from Koussevitzky's pages on life, music, and your career – to Auntie Clara's hot denunciations of meat” (Letter 301). How right she was. I already knew some of the letters from earlier research, and a trawl through the general correspondence was enough to demonstrate what an engrossing project this could be.

But how best to approach the task? The Bernstein Collection, used in conjunction with others in the Library of Congress, offered an enticing option: to present correspondence both to and from Bernstein. This was also made possible thanks to the efforts of Charlie Harmon at the Leonard Bernstein Office: after Bernstein's death in 1990, Harmon contacted significant people in Bernstein's life requesting photocopies of the letters they had received from him, and these copies were integrated into the folders in the Bernstein Collection. The Library of Congress already had Aaron Copland's and Serge Koussevitzky's papers, and it acquired David Diamond's in the course of my research. I drew up a preliminary selection of letters in early 2010 and set to work on the process of transcription and annotation. By the end of that year, the selection needed major revision – for the
best of reasons. At the end of 2010, the Bernstein estate decided that a substantial group of letters sealed after his death should be made available, and added to the Bernstein Collection in the Library of Congress. Many of these “new” letters turned out to be enthralling: personal, funny, and revealing. As work progressed, still more letters came to light (thanks to the generosity of the recipients, or their heirs), and I was in a position to make a final selection – acutely aware, of course, that more Bernstein letters will emerge in the future.