Like many figures eminent in their time through a grasp of the zeitgeist and a powerful personality, Leonard Bernstein's reputation has not worn well. Future generations may wonder why it was Bernstein who conducted the Berlin concerts in December 1989 to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall. He had no connection with Berlin, and had conducted the Berlin Philharmonic only once, in 1979. There was, too, a very obvious candidate in Kurt Masur, the great conductor who had been involved in the Leipzig uprising. But the job fell to Bernstein, who had never even lived in the continent whose unification he was celebrating. No one seemed puzzled: it was a case of the triumph of the overwhelming personality.
That personality is apparent in the recordings he made as a conductor, but not always to lasting effect. Just after finishing this book I listened to his Haydn symphony, and I have to admit it made me burst out laughing. It resembled those 1970s Wendy Carlos performances of Bach preludes on a Moog synthesiser, or perhaps a gigantic purple marshmallow lit by green neon, and had precisely nothing to do with Haydn. There are similar atrocities scattered throughout the Bernstein discography, including an unbelievable Enigma Variations and a tawdry Tristan und Isolde. There are some brilliant ones, of course, including the 1958 Rite of Spring that made Stravinsky say "Wow!" and an even more visceral Les Noces. But a lot of it hasn't lasted.
Perhaps most deplorable is Bernstein's track record with new music. He conducted and performed a lot of new music over the years, but it is striking that, given anything really good or genuinely groundbreaking, he rarely made a success out of it. Interestingly, he gave the first performance of Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie in Boston in 1949. It's a piece whose F-sharp major sugary quality seems right up Bernstein's street; in fact, after the first three performances, he never conducted it again. (Messiaen's letters here are usefully full of concerned reminders to Bernstein of how very difficult the piece is.) Later, in 1969, he and the New York Philharmonic had the honour of giving Elliott Carter's great Concerto for Orchestra its premiere. A recording was made, and it is genuinely rather shocking: one of Carter's most elegant and mercurial scores reduced to uncomprehending gibberish. Bernstein lived through an exciting period of musical invention and acted as a proponent for new music. Unfortunately, he was most at home with the small talents of William Schuman, David Diamond, Roy Harris and, above all, Aaron Copland, and not with anything more exciting.
The Letters come after a hugely admiring biography by Humphrey Burton, and I wouldn't have thought that one or the other will need to be done again. This volume is an interesting collection; Bernstein is an attractive, energetic writer and the editor has made the helpful decision to include long letters from his correspondents, which give a very good sense of where he emerged from. There are letters here from, and about, the distinguished conductor (and Bernstein's patron and reportedly his lover) Dimitri Mitropoulos that show Bernstein used all his assets to make an impression.
He was very much of his time as a homosexual trying to find a way to live in a largely hostile society. There is a heartrending letter from his wife, Felicia, written only months after their marriage, explaining how she loves him, but "We are not committed to a life sentence … you are a homosexual and may never change … I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the LB altar." His other relationships have to be pieced together in this collection; some correspondents, such as Mitropolous, evidently destroyed letters from him, others like Copland wrote allusively; a few, like Farley Granger (an impressive Hollywood conquest) wrote openly and recklessly. Bernstein's sexuality was never much of a secret, and became less so as time passed. This volume is a fascinating insight into a world of nicknames, tame psychologists talking rubbish, gifts of cufflinks between lovers and sexuality used as a gateway to career advancement.
Later, the Boston conductor Serge Koussevitsky was a tougher nut to crack. Bernstein adopts a comic UN envoy persona – "For your creative energy, your instinct for truth, your incredible incorporation of teacher and artist, I give humble thanks." It worked, and Bernstein was soon a regular in Boston. Koussevitsky was wary, nevertheless, and when Bernstein tried to include a composition of his in a programme, he jumped on him: "You stubbornly insisted on the performance of your own composition … Do you realise that you are invited as a guest conductor, to show your capacity as interpreter of great musical works? May I ask you: do you think that your composition is worthy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra?"
It soon would be. If Bernstein's style as a conductor is rapidly passing into the age of historic curiosity, and the way he lived his life not much less of an oddity, he has the distinction of composing at least one work of unquestionable greatness in West Side Story. There are other stage and film works of great interest – Fancy Free and On the Town – and I have a weak spot for the 1971 radical-chic-Broadway Mass, all Pucci kaftans and afros and tambourines on acid. But West Side Story will live forever.
The letters cast a lot of light on the long gestation of the masterpiece, including a detailed three-act scenario which sticks much more closely to the denouement of Romeo and Juliet. It is interesting to see how much Bernstein benefited from the tight control and restraint of his collaborators, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins. Robbins stopped Anita from turning, in his words, into "the typical downbeat blues torchbearing second character"; Laurents turned Bernstein away from his original idea of having the whole thing done in elevated poetic language. Initially, Bernstein refused to do the show if it were in Laurents's demotic style – and indeed walked away from it at one stage. It all led eventually to a magnificent stage musical and one of the greatest movies ever made. The regret is that Bernstein never again found such strict and benevolent partners as Robbins, Laurents and the lyricist Sondheim. There are tantalising projects that surface in these letters, such as a modern-day Bohème set in WH Auden's Brooklyn rooming house in Middagh Street, suggested by Betty Comden, and, electrifyingly, a life of Eva Peron with Lillian Hellman, suggested by Marc Blitzstein in 1952. That would be left to other hands.
This volume has been handsomely edited, and the decision to include letters from Bernstein's correspondents results in a rich portrayal of a particular age of privilege, the half-hidden circle of closeted homosexuals, the McCarthy trials, and the period of celebrity high culture that the Kennedys sponsored. Bernstein was one of those rare observant egotists, and his letters about the very first years of Israel and his concert tours around the world are absorbing. The personality is in many ways deeply humane and full of excitement; the letters, indeed, persuade one to return to some of Bernstein's old recordings. Let's put the 1963 Mozart G minor symphony on.
Then let's take it off again, and quick – they really are terrible, alas.
• Philip Hensher's most recent novel is Scenes from Early Life.
