Word: bernstein
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Johnstone says he is one of the many alumni who have maintained close college friendships over the years. He ate lunch in the Freshman Union yesterday with his college roommate of three years, Phillip Bernstein...
...Bernstein said his family sees the Johnstones at least once a year despite the fact that the Bernsteins now live in California, and the Johnstones in Needham, Massachusetts...
...despite his 1951 marriage to Actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn (whom he temporarily abandoned for a male lover two years before her death in 1978) and their three children, here is his involvement in classical music's homosexual subculture. Bernstein's predilections have never been secret in the | gossipy music world. But those who were surprised at the disclosure that Rock Hudson was gay will no doubt be shocked by Peyser's identification of Bernstein, Composer Aaron Copland, the late Conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos and others as homosexuals...
What, however, has this to do with art? The sprawling, sometimes rambling narrative indulges in an uncomfortable amount of kitchen psychoanalysis ("The only thing that can explain this man, with his chain smoking, pills, liquor, insomnia, and need for crowds, is incredible pain") in arguing that Bernstein's background has forged the schizoid musician, from slick tunesmith to leonine conductor, that he has become. In Peyser's view -- formed with the partial cooperation of Bernstein, who gave her permission to use some personal letters -- the works of the artist cannot be understood without taking into account the character...
...real problem with Bernstein lies not in the shambles of his private life but in the deterioration of his creative side. On the podium, with his exaggerated gestures and lugubrious tempos, he has become a parody of himself. As a composer, he has squandered the brilliant promise of West Side Story and the ballet Fancy Free on the embarrassing bathos of the 1971 theater piece Mass and his 1983 opera A Quiet Place. The unsavory life of the man chronicled in Peyser's portrait of the artist is almost irrelevant to the greater tragedy of the composer. Wealthy, acclaimed, esteemed...