Word: bernstein
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...Leonard Bernstein? A talented conductor and gifted composer of popular music who overreached when he tried to write "serious" scores? A lecherous bisexual who alienated his wife, confounded his children and appalled his friends with his calculated program of artful dissipation? Classical music's shining American champion, familiar to millions from his television proselytizing? By the time the reader finishes slogging through Humphrey Burton's exhaustively researched but strangely noncommittal biography, Leonard Bernstein (Doubleday; 594 pages; $25), he still hasn't got a clue...
Burton, a British television director who had known and worked with Lenny -- to use the inevitable diminutive -- since 1959, had full access to the Bernstein family archives. He marshals his narrative's facts impressively, but, alas, he provides little perspective or commentary on a man whose character cries out for both...
...Bernstein possessed a monstrous ego -- in his last concerts, all heaven gazing and fanny waggling, he parodied the suffering artist -- and a biographer could hardly ask for a better subject. The son of a wig manufacturer, Bernstein went to Harvard and made a dazzling debut with the New York Philharmonic at age 25; he conquered Broadway with West Side Story and then endured the musical catastrophes of Mass and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; he abandoned his long-suffering wife Felicia and spent his last years as the chain-smoking, emphysema-racked Yoda of the Dakota apartment building in New York City...
Burton, however, is content to merely enumerate the events along the way of this amazing odyssey. From time to time, the author permits himself the liberty of an observation -- referring to a 1940 letter from Bernstein to fellow gay composer David Diamond, in which Bernstein claims he has forsaken sex for art, Burton notes, "There is something uncharacteristically hysterical about his self-pitying tone" -- but such analytical moments are lost in the flood of numbing chronological detail...
...goal of the policy [on hate speech] is tobalance equality rights with speech rights ofeveryone," Bernstein said...