Word: hutzpa
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Interviewed about Lennie, I said I admired greatly his guts and nerve, which some of the Philharmonic musicians called hutzpa. This, for instance, he displayed when conducting (probably for the first time in his life) Puccini's La Boheme at La Scala and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the orchestra and chorus of Santa Cecilia in Rome. I did not make any remarks about Bernstein's hip movements while conducting Beethoven's Ninth...
...case you haven't already heard the classic Jewish definition of hutzpa: a defendant, who after murdering his parents, pleads for mercy from the court on grounds that he is an orphan...
...lobbies?even in men's rooms. He studies piles of scores in a couple of days. He makes a wry joke of how little he practices?and wears out the nerves of his wife and friends, who fear that he will flub during a performance. All this may be hutzpa, but it works. In fact, he rarely flubs, never falls on his face, despite his hurry. The quality that allows him to do in a breeze what others must plod to accomplish is a never-say-die rationality, a formidable ability to put his life in order and his work...
...Millay. He has hutzpa all right, but always with more than a grain of justification. "Nobody," he once announced, "can handle the sonnet form like me and Millay"?but he could point to some entirely respectable poetry he had written in spare moments. He pronounces foreign words with elaborate accuracy?but it is not just an affectation, for he speaks five foreign languages (German, French, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew). He loves to give advice to experts on their own specialty? theater technicians on lighting, or classicists on Latin?but he has an impressive body of general information and education...
...Discovery. If, in the minds of some, hutzpa is the key word to Leonard Bernstein, his father uses another Jewish expression to describe his hopes for his son. It is ruach Elohim, the godly spirit...