The Jєωιѕн-run media will hype the 100th birth anniversary of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ, Zionist composer Lenny Bernstein.
But who really was he ?


Leonard Bernstein cared more about Israel than Sex


"gαy men of importance", Sondheim & Bernstein circa 1965

Robert Gottlieb reviews a volume of Leonard Bernstein’s letters in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books:

What really mattered to him?
He’s not going to tell us, but the Letters, read in conjunction with Humphrey Burton’s excellent 1994 biography, Leonard Bernstein, suggest that there were three things that motored him: music, of course; his family, despite (or because of) the conflicts; his Judaism (and his belief in Israel). The money, the celebrity, the sex were front and center, but not, in the long run, central.


So Israel was a motor of Bernstein’s actions. But in the rest of this review, there is not another word about the place, and a lot about sex, music and family. We learn about Bernstein’s likely affairs with Aaron Copland and Dmitri Mitropoulos, about the understanding that his wife Felicia expressed to Bernstein after she married him in 1951 that he was gαy and he was going to have affairs; and about his busting loose in the 1970s and leaving her for a young man and her cursing him to die a lonely feeble man.


Bernstein & Copeland, circa 1987
("Flaming" until the end)



Don’t get me wrong. This is fascinating stuff. But the omission is the psychological fallacy,  Jєωιѕн intellectual indifference to our political conditions alongside keen interest in our social ones. Here was an American celebrity who took Israel more seriously than his flings, who spent a lot of time going out to Israel even as he was hosting fundraisers for the Black Panthers back in the U.S. I’m interested. How do you support a Jєωιѕн state far from here that you don’t have to live in and that discriminates against its non-Jєωιѕн citizens and support a revolutionary black group in the country that you do live in?

Bernstein’s stance is the essence of what is today a terrific malady in the Jєωιѕн community: PEP (Progressive Except Palestine). But Gottlieb and The New York Review of Books editors are in the bubble. Israel’s a great good thing established long ago and it’ll be here forever, and meanwhile let’s gossip about other members of the elite. (The review contains delicious morsels about Martha Gellhorn, Jackie Kennedy, Paul Bowles and Ernest Hemingway.) When actually we live very much in history, and Bernstein knew it, and he figured it out wrong. And that’s a problem.

P.S. The article is very hard on Bernstein and contains a great line about Bernstein’s mysterious psyche worth taping to the wall: “The confusion between genius and narcissism, heroism and self-pity, generosity and exploitation remains unresolved.”

Source
Source

This is really nasty:

Mass (Bernstein)
Page issues

Mass (formally: MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers) is a musical theatre work composed by Leonard Bernstein with text by Bernstein and additional text and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy, it premiered on September 8, 1971, conducted by Maurice Peress.^[1] The performance was part of the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.^[2] Mass premiered in Europe in 1973, with John Mauceri conducting the Yale Symphony Orchestra in Vienna.^[3]
Originally, Bernstein had intended to compose a traditional Mass, but instead decided on a more innovative form.^{[citation needed]} The work is based on the Tridentine Mass of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the liturgical passages are sung in Latin, Mass also includes additional texts in English written by Bernstein, Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz,^[4] and Paul Simon (who wrote the first quatrain of the trope "Half of the People"). The work is intended to be staged theatrically, but it has also been performed in a standard concert setting.
Initial critical reception, including a review in the New York Times, was largely negative,^[1] but the Columbia Recordsrecording of the work enjoyed excellent sales.^[5]

I have always been an admirer of Leonard Bernstein's work, especially because he's part of the decade where American composers started to finally make a mark on Western music.

Your comment is sadly, very true. Music history gets quite sordid.

I associate him with schlock.