JOHN PODHORETZ REVIEWS MAESTRO:
[Bradley] Cooper offers a 10-minute example of this performance style two-thirds of the way through the movie, in a self-consciously bravura scene in which [Leonard] Bernstein is shown conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony in a British cathedral. It’s filmed as a “one-er,” as though you are seeing it live in a single take, though you are not. You’re supposed to gasp and wonder at the channeling of this long-dead Great Artist, the merger of Bradley and Lenny into a single phenomenon. But for me, watching Bernstein today conducting at the Ely Cathedral on YouTube and watching Cooper in Maestro, it’s a little hard not to giggle. Both of them look like nothing so much as Bugs Bunny channeling Bernstein’s florid predecessor Leopold Stokowski in the Looney Tunes masterpiece “Long-Haired Hare.” They are human cartoons of over-enthusiasm, trying to make you think what you’re watching or seeing is exciting and demanding your attention and applause. The sequence is meant to portray Bernstein as the embodiment of the American artiste—and as such is the final element in the grand cultural effort that should be known as the Leonard Bernstein Project.
For it very much was a Project, a conscious Project, and a wildly successful one too. As Humphrey Burton details in his extraordinary 1994 biography, the idea that Bernstein should become the great figure in American classical music was literally a plan hatched in part by his friend (and lover) Aaron Copland in the late 1930s, when Bernstein was barely 20 years old.
The plan was for him to be “the great American conductor,” and every aspect of his public actions in the five decades that followed was in service of that aim and the larger goal of establishing America as the cultural master of the world. To that end, he was invited to give highly distinguished lectures at Ivy League universities about his theory of music, which read like gibberish today—he sought to provide a “grammar of music” based on Noam Chomsky’s then-canonical but now-discredited theory of grammar. But he was protected from some of the consequences of his own moderate intellectual gifts by believing in the Right Things as the cultural commissars of the day defined them.
Bernstein was one of the key markers of the moment in time when America took unambiguous control of center stage in the West. He mixed popular culture, middlebrow culture, a now sadly anachronistic hip-Jew culture, glamor, riches, fame, trendy progressive politics, and (at a key moment when his star seemed to be dimming) out-of-the-closet gay culture in a resonant and enduring stew.
He was a remarkable presence in American life, suggestive not only of the country’s wild 20th century ambitions but also of the temptations and corruptions laid out in his path. Like almost everyone else in New York cultural circles, he fell in line when Vietnam-era politics went from liberal to radical, exalting criminality and the enemies of America even as he drank deep the dregs of American liberality and capitalist largesse.
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