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      Leonard Bernstein’s Children Defend Bradley Cooper’s Prosthetic Nose in ‘Maestro’

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      A teaser for the Netflix biopic has ignited a new round of criticism that the family described as a misunderstanding.Leonard Bernstein’s three children came to the defense of the actor and director Bradley Cooper on Wednesday after he drew fresh criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of the midcentury American composer and conductor, who was Jewish, in the forthcoming movie “Maestro.”When the makeup was first revealed last year, some questioned the decision by Cooper, who is not Jewish, to play Bernstein, who died in 1990. In the Netflix film, he stars opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein.The debut of a teaser trailer on Tuesday prompted further discussion on social media about both the prosthesis, which critics said played into an antisemitic trope, and about whether an actor who is Jewish should instead have been cast to play Bernstein, the “West Side Story” composer and music director of the New York Philharmonic.David Baddiel, a British comedian and author of the 2021 book “Jews Don’t Count,” cited Cooper as the latest instance of a gentile actor objectionably portraying a real-life Jewish figure. “I’ve talked about authenticity casting not applying to Jews — and what that means — many times,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The only difference here is it’s more — well — on the nose.”In a series of posts on X, the Bernsteins’ three children — Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein — said that Cooper had consulted with them “along every step of his amazing journey.”“It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of his efforts,” they said of Cooper. “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”They added, “Any strident complaints around this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch.”Through a representative, Cooper declined to comment. Netflix did not reply to a request for comment.“Maestro” premieres next month at the Venice Film Festival and, in North America, in October at the New York Film Festival. A theatrical release in the United States will follow in November before a December debut on Netflix.In recent years, the question of which actors are eligible to play certain roles has been a hot-button issue in movies, television and theater, with an increasing consensus against actors’ portraying characters from marginalized groups whose traits they do not share.Tom Hanks told The New York Times Magazine last year that in contemporary times he would correctly not be cast as a gay man with AIDS, as he was in the 1993 drama “Philadelphia.” At the 2016 Emmy Awards, the actor Jeffrey Tambor said he hoped to be the last cisgender man to play a transgender character, as he did in the series “Transparent.”Some critics, like Baddiel, argue that there is a double standard when it comes to casting Jewish characters, whose portrayal by gentiles is widely tolerated.Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish, plays the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in a biopic coming out this month (even as Liev Schreiber, who is Jewish, plays Henry Kissinger in the film, “Golda”). In the recent biopic “Oppenheimer,” the Jewish title character was played by the non-Jewish actor Cillian Murphy. More

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      André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

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      One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.His own arrival in the spotlight was auspicious. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally televised series of Young People’s Concerts.Mr. Bernstein was effusive as he introduced the young pianist to the crowd at Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said, recounting the young pianist’s audition.Mr. Watts was then living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a beat-up piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a bona fide star.A couple weeks later, Mr. Bernstein invited him to make his formal Philharmonic debut, substituting for the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”“It was like being God Almighty at 16,” he told The Times.André Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Herman Watts, a noncommissioned officer stationed overseas for the U.S. Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.His mother, who was fond of playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he took up the piano after a flirtation with the violin.“I liked the sound,” he recalled in a 1993 television appearance. “I would hold the pedal down for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”When he was 8, the family moved to the United States for his father’s work, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship grew strained, and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the following decades.His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as teacher, coach and manager, and she enforced a strict practice regimen.Mr. Watts with Leonard Bernstein in 1963 after he performed a Liszt piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould. Mr. Watts later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”Associated PressAndré struggled to fit in at school, quarreling with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither Black nor white.When he went to Florida as a teenager to perform, his manager, invoking the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed suspiciously.But his mother told him that he should not blame racism for his troubles. “If someone is not nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalled her saying when he was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t have to be automatically because of your color.”“These kinds of advice have taught me that when I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it is a racial thing,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are, first of all, never provable as racist anyway. So it’s a waste of time.”He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, which had long been seen as the dominion of the white and wealthy. In introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert, Mr. Bernstein described his international heritage and said, “I love that kind of story.”In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts won a Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist. Despite his early success, he tried to remain grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass away,” taken from a poem by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase inscribed on a gold medallion that he wore around his neck.)He graduated in 1972 from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied with the pedagogue and performer Leon Fleisher. He was already a regular on the global concert circuit by the time he graduated, playing the Liszt concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, before sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.Mr. Watts in performance with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2005.Richard Termine for The New York TimesMr. Watts earned mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could sometimes get carried away. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate from the keyboard.“He has that kind of personal magic that makes an Event of a concert, and Philharmonic Hall had the electric feeling that occurs only when an important artist is at work,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “It cannot be taught, this mysterious transmission from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it in very large measure.”While Mr. Watts thrived on the stage, recording was more of a challenge; he said he was prone to clam up without an audience. And at times he suffered financial and management difficulties, including in 1992, when he was ordered by a New York State appellate court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making frequent appearances on television and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He grew fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and he began to study Zen Buddhism.In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right.”His collaborators described him as a musician of preternatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intent on finding fresh meaning each time.“Every night was a new adventure,” Mr. Spano said. “He radiated love to people and to the music, and it was unmistakable. That’s why he was so loved as a performer, because of the generosity of his music making.”He was also a role model for many Black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts’s at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts had taught since 2004, recalled him as a devoted teacher who was eager to “hand down this ferociousness about trying to become better.”“Whenever we were onstage together, there was this unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world where a lot of people think we shouldn’t be,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is Black. “It was an affirmation.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had been planning a feat: He would play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in a version that he had reworked for the right hand (his left was recovering from a nerve injury). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he got daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that emerged outside his home in Bloomington.Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concerto because of health problems and the pandemic. He mostly stopped playing the piano after the concerts were canceled, instead spending time with students.His wife said that music had sustained him throughout his life, beginning with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played, then he was happy. It just really lifted up his soul.”He described music as a sacred space in which he felt he could breathe and flourish.“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have, and it is, in the sense of private and sacred, something that you need to protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. “The dross of everyday life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you need to protect your special relationship with your music.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      The Real Star of Bradley Cooper’s Film “Maestro” May Be a House

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      Leonard Bernstein’s country house hasn’t changed much since the composer hosted Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins there. Jamie Bernstein is OK with that.In the early 1960s, after a number of summers renting on Martha’s Vineyard, Jamie Bernstein’s family bought a vacation home on a wooded hill in West Redding, Conn. There, 9-year-old Jamie and her younger brother, Alexander, devised various games of make-believe, chief among them a fantasy that they lived the same sort of low-key, small-town existence as the characters on their favorite television shows.It was a testament to the imaginative gifts of children whose actual home was a duplex apartment across the street from Carnegie Hall, and whose father was the celebrated, heat-seeking “West Side Story” composer and New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein.“Once we had this little house, we weren’t going to Martha’s Vineyard and we were much closer to Manhattan, which was probably way more convenient for my parents,” said Ms. Bernstein, 70, the author of the 2018 memoir “Famous Father Girl” and the host of “The NY Phil Story: Made in New York,” a new podcast about the Philharmonic produced by the orchestra and the public radio station WQXR. “It meant that we could go there on the weekends during the regular part of the year.”“The front of the house makes it look very grand,” said Jamie Bernstein, the host of “The NY Phil Story: Made in New York” podcast, who spends weekends at the Fairfield, Conn., house that she and her two siblings inherited from their father, the composer and  Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein. “But it isn’t as grand as it looks.”Allegra Anderson for The New York TimesThen, when her sister Nina was born in 1962, “we were a family of five,” Ms. Bernstein continued. “Plus the nanny and the cook who sometimes came up with us on the weekends. And suddenly the house seemed too small.”A few months later, her mother, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, an actor and artist, announced that she had just bought a big, new country place. “And I guess I must have asked, ‘Well, how much did it cost?’” Ms. Bernstein recalled. “And my mother said, ‘Oh, I can’t talk about that. It was so expensive I can’t even say it out loud.’ And my brother and I were saying, ‘Oh, come on, how much was it? How much was it?’ We badgered her until finally she whispered, ‘80.’”Her children gasped: “$80 — it cost $80?”In that same whisper, Mrs. Bernstein corrected them: “$80,000.”What in those days seemed a lordly sum bought a former horse farm with a pool, a tennis court and outbuildings on six and a half acres in Fairfield, Conn. Over the years, additional parcels of woodland — almost 12 acres’ worth — were acquired to give the family more privacy and more of an escape from urban cares.“It was marvelous,” Ms. Bernstein said. “We spent many summers here, and almost every weekend during the rest of the year. We all loved it.”Ms. Bernstein shows off a photo of herself as a child flanked by her parents.Allegra Anderson for The New York TimesJamie Bernstein, 70Occupation: Author, filmmaker, podcast hostTaking the cure: “We go to the house to be completely relaxed. It’s like the antidote to New York life.”After Mr. Bernstein’s death in 1990 (Mrs. Bernstein died in 1978), the three children inherited the property. But it is Jamie who is most frequently in residence — pretty much every weekend.As when their parents were alive, the compound is a gathering spot for birthdays and holidays, and for fiercely contested rounds of Anagrams. Lately, it has also served as a set for the upcoming film “Maestro,” a portrait of the Bernsteins’ complicated marriage directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. (Carey Mulligan plays Felicia.)“He wanted an authenticity about how he was evoking our dad and his world,” Ms. Bernstein said of Mr. Cooper. “He was very curious to come up here and visit, and that’s when he decided he wanted to come back and shoot in and around the house. Bradley totally got why this place was so great and how it contains the family DNA.”Indeed, the house, with its graciously proportioned rooms, has barely been altered since the days when it was populated by the senior Bernsteins and their great and good friends — among them, Stephen Sondheim (who did not quite take it in stride when Jamie beat him at Anagrams), Jerome Robbins, Mike Nichols and Richard Avedon (who took the picture of Jamie that sits among a clutch of family photos in the living room).The Steinway baby grand in the living room was a gift to Mr. Bernstein from a childhood piano teacher, Helen Coates, who later became his secretary.Allegra Anderson for The New York Times“When we got older, we realized, ‘Boy, we had a lot of cool people at our house,’” Ms. Bernstein said. “But when we were little, they were just our parents’ friends. To us, they were just Steve and Jerry and Mike and Dick.”It may have been Mr. Sondheim who bought his “West Side Story” collaborator the abacus that sits on a shelf in the dining room — “I can’t guarantee that’s the case,” she said — and it was Mr. Sondheim or maybe Mr. Nichols who bought the fine telescope on the floor nearby.“There was a while there when our parents would have these Christmas parties for all their pals,” Ms. Bernstein said. “And there was a competitiveness about the present-giving that became so oppressive that my mother said, ‘We’re not having these parties anymore.’”The furniture — heavy on rattan, wicker and bamboo — conjures a summer pavilion. So does the dining room, which is anchored by a white-painted table and chairs, and filled with plants. Its entryway, framed by a trellis, adds to the illusion.“Our mother was a kind of brilliant, instinctive decorator,” Ms. Bernstein said. “Everyplace we lived was elegant but comfortable.”She recalled dinners with her father or mother at the head of the table. Under the carpet was a plug for a bell to summon the help, “and my parents would start disappearing,” Ms. Bernstein said. “They would go lower and lower down in their chair, as their foot groped for the buzzer.”The Steinway baby grand in the living room was a gift to Mr. Bernstein from a childhood piano teacher, Helen Coates, who later became his secretary. It was Ms. Coates who determinedly made the winning bid when, in 1949, there was an auction to raise money for the library in Lenox, Mass., and Mr. Bernstein made a painting, supposedly of Salome doing her Dance of the Seven Veils, to aid the cause.The pool was one of the family’s favorite spots. At least one guest has reported seeing the ghost of Ms. Bernstein’s mother, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, in the garden next to it.Allegra Anderson for The New York Times“Helen acquired it, so that for the rest of time nobody would see it,” Ms. Bernstein said, pointing to her father’s well-meaning work hanging in a corner not far from the piano.“My father,” she added, quite unnecessarily, “was not visually talented.”The recollections that Ms. Bernstein and her siblings have of their childhood at the Fairfield house — family swims; their father carrying a saltshaker to the vegetable garden in the morning to properly season his chosen breakfast; elegant lunches of stuffed tomatoes with homemade mayonnaise on the terrace — have been overlaid by more recent memories. And the next generation, the children of the Bernstein children, now have their own history here and, of course, their own memories.“That,” Ms. Bernstein said, “is the beauty of having a house that stays in the family.”“If some wallpaper is coming unglued, if some fabrics are fading, if some drawer fronts are hanging by a thread and cabinets are stuffed with baffling detritus — well, it’s all part of the family DNA.“We don’t fix things,” Ms. Bernstein conceded. “There is a distinct element of funk in this house now. It’s kind of funky. But we’re kind of funky, too.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      A Monkish Conductor Who Expressed His Faith Through Music

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      A new 69-disc box of Dimitri Mitropoulos’s recordings are an opportunity to reassess a conductor who remains out of reach.When Dimitri Mitropoulos was putting together the programs that he would conduct in 1947 as a guest of the New York Philharmonic — the ensemble he later led in a fraught tenure from 1949 to 1958 — he likely could not have predicted which item on his typically eclectic lists would be the most controversial.One week, this “strangest and most curiously gifted” of conductors, as Olin Downes of The New York Times called him, preceded Gershwin’s Piano Concerto with the American premiere of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, at a time when Mahler’s works were regarded with incredulity. The week before, Mitropoulos, the Greek American music director of the Minneapolis Symphony, had offered firsts of Bartok and Barber. Before that, he had given a Thanksgiving premiere of Krenek’s Symphony No. 4, a serial work with “about as much savor to it as a pasteboard turkey,” the critic Virgil Thomson quipped.Yet none of that caused the caustic ire reserved for Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony.” “A composer would be a little embarrassed to confess to the authorship of a score like this today,” Downes railed after the Philharmonic concert on Nov. 20, joking that only an atomic bomb had been left out of its “sensational and expensive sounds.” If the parting of Strauss’s thunderstorm was “mellifluous,” he admitted, it was still “sentimental in the most bourgeois vein,” music “from which one would have expected Mr. Mitropoulos long since to have graduated.”Even so, the “Alpine Symphony” was the kind of gospel that Mitropoulos, a missionary for new and underappreciated music whose hair-shirt devotion and tall, bald figure evoked the monks he had thought of joining as a boy, could preach aflame in inspiration. Listen to a Philharmonic broadcast from Nov. 23, and you hear a Strauss not of banality but spirituality; what Downes dismissed as mawkish, Mitropoulos conducts as rapture.Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony”New York Philharmonic, 1947 (Music & Arts)Conducting was a calling for Mitropoulos, an alpinist who felt closest to God in the mountains but expressed his faith enduring trials of music. His aim, he wrote to his muse, Katy Katsoyanis, in 1947, was “to surpass the material, to annihilate it, reduce it to nothing, so that the spiritual achievement becomes an absolute morality.” It was also carnal, an act of metaphysical love between conductor and orchestra that this largely celibate gay man, as his exemplary biographer William R. Trotter portrays him, saw as “another expression my unlived sexual life.”Painstakingly committing the tiniest details of scores to memory, Mitropoulos seemed not to direct music but to emanate and embody it, fists flailing and feet flying. He was, on principal, a collaborator, one who worshiped the charitable example of St. Francis of Assisi and refused to wield a baton, which he saw as a symbol of subjugation. But his ability to unify gesture and tone paradoxically appeared imperious to some, even authoritarian, a denial of spontaneity and specificity of style.Either way, if Mitropoulos’s detractors granted that his erratic interpretations, driven tempos and taut, sinewy sound served some music spectacularly well, ministering to the downtrodden of the world’s (male) composers was not what his times demanded.Mitropoulos, an alpinist who felt closest to God in the mountains, in 1949.NY Phil Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives“Mr. Mitropoulos conducts the wrong pieces magnificently,” Thomson surmised after his Philharmonic debut, in 1940; a reputation for coarseness in the canon of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms would undo him when New York critics sought blood over a decade later.The stature of “the most masterful of all modern conductors,” as the critic Neville Cardus anointed him, has since wilted in the egotistical heat cast by his erstwhile protégé, constant betrayer and eventual successor: Leonard Bernstein.A new, 69-disc Sony Classical box of Mitropoulos’s recordings might grant an opportunity to reassess the conductor, but if there is far too little of what Thomson thought of as the “right” music to be heard in it, there’s hardly enough of the “wrong” music to challenge the conventional wisdom either. The real Mitropoulos remains frustratingly out of reach.Sony is not at fault here. Releasing many of Mitropoulos’s recordings for the first time in the digital era, it has filled the last gaping hole in the discography of the Philharmonic’s post-Toscanini decades. The blame lies with the label that recorded Mitropoulos for much of his career, Columbia, whose executives chose Eugene Ormandy over interpretive insight and stuck Mitropoulos with the leftovers, deploying him as a concerto accompanist and offering him scant chance to fulfill his mission. The decision was commercial; the pity is lasting.Mitropoulos was born in Athens in 1896. He was young when he began to study piano; soon enough, if he wasn’t joining his uncles to pray in the monasteries of Mount Athos, he was spending his Saturdays leading scratch ensembles at home. At the Athens Conservatory, he trained as a keyboard virtuoso of firebrand talents and as a composer of Romantic tastes. Aside from some transcriptions, he rarely performed his own works later on, but he made his podium debut in 1915 with his tone poem “Tafi” (“Burial”).After a brief spell in Brussels, Mitropoulos went to Berlin to study composition with Ferruccio Busoni, then worked as an assistant conductor at the State Opera there. But the modernist impulses he came to feel in Weimar-era Berlin, influencing both his inclinations in the repertory and his formidable last compositions, were of little use back in Greece, where duty bade him return in 1924 to lead the Conservatory Orchestra in Athens, a poor ensemble he turned into a listenable one.His breakthrough came in 1930, when one of his patrons hired the Berlin Philharmonic for him to conduct a concert: After Egon Petri withdrew from Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, Mitropoulos took up the solo part as well. Repeating that shocking display of musical ability elsewhere drew the attention of Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s director, who invited him to be a guest conductor. Upon that debut, in 1936, the Boston Herald said that “his body, even more than the notes of the score, seems the source of the music.” Critics gossiped of finding Toscanini’s heir.Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3: Allegro ma non troppoRobin Hood Dell Orchestra of Philadelphia, 1946 (Sony Classical)When Mitropoulos returned to Boston in January 1937, he added a date with the Minneapolis Symphony, now the Minnesota Orchestra, which Ormandy had jilted for Philadelphia the year before. “Mitropoulos appeared to be a fanatic who had sold his soul to music” wrote a local critic, who described conducting “so full of blood, muscle, and nerves as to seem alive and sentient.” Mitropoulos was announced as the music director within a couple of weeks, and would stay for 12 years.Mitropoulos’s stint in the Twin Cities was radical in more than just repertoire, challenging the godlike halo of other conductors with his asceticism. He lived in dorm rooms at the University of Minnesota. Spending on little but his habit of catching a double feature, he gave his salary away, much of it to the players whose privations he shared on endless tours. His sexuality remained private, the closet one act of discipline among many; the summer of 1943 was spent doing exhausting manual labor for the Red Cross.Mitropoulos’s marked copy of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung.”NY Phil Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThere were tribulations in the music to which Mitropoulos exposed his listeners in the five-thousand-seat Northrop Auditorium, too. Alongside recent music from Rachmaninoff and Vaughan Williams came the dissonances of Schoenberg, Krenek and Artur Schnabel, the pianist whose First Symphony even Milton Babbitt described as “murderously complex” after hearing Mitropoulos’s unhappy performance of it in 1946.The Minneapolis recordings in Sony’s box give no more hint of such ambition than a pioneering Mahler Symphony No. 1. Mitropoulos chafed at the early recording process, but his style is audible through dismal sound. Dynamics are extreme, and accents are firm. If his Schumann Second suffers from his wrestling, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” — the only one of that composer’s symphonies that he recorded — sounds aptly brawny today. And his burly rhythmic insistence makes unexpected triumphs of Franck’s Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead.”Mahler’s Symphony No. 1: Stürmisch bewegtMinneapolis Symphony, 1940 (Sony Classical)The question was never whether Mitropoulos would leave Minneapolis, but for which ensemble and when. He took charge of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s summer concerts from 1945 to 1948, but Ormandy proved immovable. Boston looked likely until Koussevitzky’s homophobia — abetted by the ambitious Bernstein’s evident outing of Mitropoulos, his youthful crush, to his new mentor — ended that path. The last orchestra standing was the New York Philharmonic, an overworked, underpaid orchestra with a fearsome reputation.“I have to go,” Mitropoulos told his Minneapolis concertmaster, Louis Krasner, “even though I know I am probably going to my doom.”Doom awaited, although there was success before the fall. The repertoire was again catholic, ambitious, brilliantly risky. His “Elektra” and “Wozzeck” were historic. Plenty of Schoenberg’s scores received hearings; difficulties rehearsing the monodrama “Erwartung” led Mitropoulos to ask Katsoyanis whether his compulsion for “distorted and screwy beauty” was just an “egotistical occupation” with “the pleasure of self-destruction.” It almost was after Milhaud’s colossally challenging “Christophe Colomb” humiliated him in November 1952. He had a heart attack within weeks.Mitropoulos never drew the loyalty from the Philharmonic that he had secured in Minneapolis; the players took advantage of his financial generosity or publicly threw their parts of a Webern work at his feet. Snide remarks about his private sexuality were common, and Bernstein gossiped conspiratorially that it was wrong for a bachelor to hold such a post. Mitropoulos was reduced to tears before the orchestra’s hostility. Trotter writes that this saintly figure once grew so exasperated that he threatened the players with the tyranny of George Szell.Mitropoulos, center, with the conductor Herbert von Karajan to his left and his erstwhile protégé Leonard Bernstein to his right.Don Hunstein, via NY Phil Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThe standard account is that standards plummeted, that Mitropoulos’s fervent intensity inevitably generated rough playing; The Times remarked in 1955 that it was “a sin to let the Philharmonic play like this.” That decline is not wholly apparent in Sony’s box, though in Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” among other works, there are moments of horrifying playing.Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10: AllegroNew York Philharmonic, 1954 (Sony Classical)Dig through the criminal number of concertos — few of them as valuable as Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with David Oistrakh — and there are worthwhile records to be heard: consuming Mendelssohn; fierce accounts of Shostakovich’s Fifth and Tenth; an astonishingly brutal Vaughan Williams Fourth, Mitropoulos’s most exhilarating recording. Of Strauss, there is only a tired excerpt from “Salome.” For Mahler, you must turn to his stunning broadcasts, above all a Sixth from 1955.Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 4: Finale con epilogo fugatoNew York Philharmonic, 1956 (Sony Classical)Even as critics lauded Mitropoulos’s appearances with the Metropolitan Opera — his recording of Barber’s “Vanessa” from 1958 is gorgeous — they made him a scapegoat as they demanded the end of a dreary era in the Philharmonic’s history, dating back to Toscanini’s departure in 1936.“The Philharmonic—What’s Wrong With It and Why” ran a Times headline on April 29, 1956, as the critic Howard Taubman savaged its deterioration. Bernstein was announced as co-conductor for the 1957-58 season that October; it would be Mitropoulos’s last, though he returned for a Mahler Festival in 1960, while Bernstein began to profit from the repertory path he had blazed.By then, Mitropoulos was working himself into the grave after another massive heart attack. His last concert was in Cologne, Germany, a Mahler Third whose finale has an irradiant glow. He died as he sought to, falling from on high — not from a mountain, but from the podium in Milan, on Nov. 2, 1960. He was 64. More

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      Review: Leonard Bernstein’s ‘A Quiet Place’ at the Paris Opera

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      In Paris, a new production of “A Quiet Place” makes a strong case for a work that has long struggled to join the repertory.PARIS — “We’re going to listen to music that describes emotions — feelings like pain, happiness, loneliness, anger, love,” Leonard Bernstein once said during an episode of his beloved, televised “Young People’s Concerts.”“I guess most music is like that,” he added. “And the better it is, the more it will make you feel those emotions that the composer felt when he was writing.”Bernstein was introducing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, but he could just as easily have been speaking about his own music — even his grim and spiky final opera, “A Quiet Place.” With a libretto by Stephen Wadsworth, this piece has had a tortured history, struggling to find its form before and after its 1983 premiere. It was heavily criticized, and revised several times, culminating in 2013 with a version by Garth Edwin Sunderland that could give this work — in a genre that kept eluding Bernstein — a brighter future.That version, a sweeping rethinking of the piece’s dramaturgy and orchestration, has been altered again for the Paris Opera, which is giving Sunderland’s edition its most prominent staging yet in a new production that opened on Wednesday at the Palais Garnier.In the conductor Kent Nagano, the production has the world’s finest champion of “A Quiet Place,” who several years ago recorded Sunderland’s version and again leads it to brilliant and illuminating effect. And in the director Krzysztof Warlikowski, it has one of the European stage’s smartest interpreters of family dysfunction and sexual complexity, the opera’s central themes.At the end of Act II, Warlikowski adds a scene in which a boy sneakily watches that episode of “Young People’s Concerts” after his parents go to sleep. And in its best moments, the work gives you what Bernstein described on TV: the ability to make you feel the emotions he had when he was writing an at times painfully personal opera. It remains full of flaws — mainly, clichés of mid-20th-century American ennui — yet in its current form, it is also a piece of subtlety and suggestion, a short story with the weight of a novel, an example of masterly craft and postmodern style.“A Quiet Place” — the story of a matriarch’s death, and the reconciliation it brings her broken family, inspired by Bernstein and Wadsworth’s own losses — was originally created as a sequel to Bernstein’s satirical, jazzy one-act “Trouble in Tahiti,” from the early 1950s; they were first presented together as a punishingly long double bill. Bernstein and Wadsworth revised “A Quiet Place” to be a single, three-act work, with “Trouble in Tahiti” incorporated as flashbacks. That, too, made for a bloated evening, in length and in a maximalist scoring for over 70 musicians, including electric guitar and synthesizer.Sunderland’s version is leaner in every respect. He does away with “Trouble in Tahiti,” whose bitter effervescence collided ungracefully with the thorniness of “A Quiet Place,” and reduced some characters while expanding others, reinstating some arias that had been cut. He reorchestrated the score for just 18 players, and the running time was brought down to roughly 90 minutes, with no intermission.For the Paris Opera, Sunderland kept the brevity but fleshed out the instrumentation — a Goldilocks medium between 18 and 72 musicians — including added winds and brasses, along with a harpsichord and organ, which provides heft and naturalism in the Act I funeral without sacrificing the clarity of the 2013 version. The electric guitar and synthesizer, which inevitably evoke the 1980s, are thankfully still gone.Johanna Wokalek, front right, is an addition in the silent role of Dinah, normally just mentioned by name but here haunting the stage throughout.Bernd UhligTo further avoid seeming dated, Warlikowski’s staging, while set in 1983, is not a facsimile of its time. It takes place in a single room, faced head-on, of towering walls and with sets simultaneously familiar and impossible to place: that era’s fashions, surrounded by sleek, futuristic panels. Spaces like these — designed by Warlikowski’s frequent collaborator Malgorzata Szczesniak, and typical of his productions — can feel at once expansive and suffocating, and his characters tend to behave accordingly, both exposed and trapped.Warlikowski is otherwise largely deferential to the libretto — with a few affecting interventions. Dinah, one half of the unhappy couple of “Trouble in Tahiti,” isn’t in “A Quiet Place,” which begins with her funeral. But Warlikowski casts a silent actor (Johanna Wokalek) in the role, and she haunts the stage throughout, in a blending of time and memory that mirrors the non sequiturs of the libretto’s slides into reverie and role play.It’s one of several ways Dinah is present in this production, which opens with a video (by Kamil Polak) of her fatal car accident — likely a suicide, almost certainly under the influence — and, for the rending Act I postlude music, projects a portrait of her above the coffin and crematory. In it, she is the face of the post-World War II American ideal, but with the empty expression and double-edged smile of a James Rosenquist painting.Dinah and her husband, Sam — the baritone Russell Braun, a standout, delicate and with a vast emotional range of pain, anger and aimlessness — had two children. One is the gay, mentally ill Junior (the bass-baritone Gordon Bintner, elegant in his rage and woefully redolent of “Dear Evan Hansen” in his constant, visible neuroses); the other, Dede (Claudia Boyle, a soprano who warmed up to the role as the evening went on).A new member of the family is François, Dede’s husband (Frédéric Antoun, strained at the opera’s climax), whom she met through his former lover, Junior. If that suggests incestuous behavior, just wait: We learn that Junior and Dede also experimented with each other as children.From left, Antoun, Bintner, Wokalek, Braun and Boyle near the opera’s ending, in which the family discovers that its only way forward is forgiveness.Bernd UhligJunior enters the funeral in a garish, pink-and-purple cowboy outfit — a choice that makes sense later when he is represented as a boy wearing the same costume, being held and then rejected by his mother. The opera’s conflation of insanity and homosexuality has long been one of its problems, but Warlikowski helps slightly by treating Junior’s queerness as coincident with, rather than the cause of, his arrested development. Other things that have aged poorly, though, are baked into the text; Dinah’s misery-driven alcoholism is more worthy of sighs than sympathy.There were more innovative American operas that premiered in the 1980s: Philip Glass’s portrait of resistance in “Satyagraha”; or the grand, nearly mythic treatment of leaders in Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and in John Adams’s “Nixon in China.” “A Quiet Place” benefits from no longer being so directly juxtaposed with them; it is now easier to meet on its own terms, neither avant-garde nor as eager to please as Bernstein’s earlier works.And while it can sometimes feel like a rote regurgitation of postwar culture and its miseries, the ambiguous ending is something of a departure from those clichés. In Warlikowski’s staging, Bernstein’s uneasy final chords accompany an image of Dinah’s family sharing a sofa. The only way forward for them is forgiveness — not the most common way for an opera to end, but a recollection of a classic: Janacek’s “Jenufa.”Look closely at the four of them: Sam and Junior, reunited; François; and Dede, who scoots, visibly uncomfortable, away from her husband. They are still suffering, in a cycle you could see continuing to the present day. The distinctly American darkness of “A Quiet Place” may be more relevant than we’d like to think.A Quiet PlaceThrough March 30 at the Paris Opera; operadeparis.fr. More

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      ‘West Side Story’ Review: In Love and War, 1957 Might Be Tonight

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      Steven Spielberg rediscovers the breathing, troubling essence of a classic, building a bold and current screen musical with no pretense to perfection.“West Side Story” sits near the pinnacle of post-World War II American middlebrow culture. First performed on Broadway in 1957 and brought to the screen four years later, it survives as both a time capsule and a reservoir of imperishable songs. What its creators attempted — a swirling fusion of literary sophistication and contemporary social concern, of playfulness and solemnity, of realism and fantasy, of street fighting and ballet — hadn’t quite been attempted before, and hasn’t been matched since.The idea of harnessing the durable tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet” to the newsy issues of juvenile delinquency and ethnic intolerance must have seemed, to Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, both audacious and obvious. In the years since, “West Side Story” has proved irresistible — to countless high-school musical theater programs and now to Steven Spielberg, whose film version reaffirms its indelible appeal while making it feel bold, surprising and new.This isn’t to say that the show has ever been perfect. Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics (and who died just after Thanksgiving at 91), frequently disdained his own contributions, including the charming “I Feel Pretty.” The depiction of Puerto Rican and Anglo (or “gringo”) youth gangs has been faulted for sociological imprecision and cultural insensitivity. Shakespeare’s Verona might not translate so easily into the slums of mid-20th-century Manhattan.But perfection has never been a relevant standard for musicals. The genre has always been a glorious, messy mash-up of aesthetic transcendence and commercial ambition, a grab-bag of styles and sources held together by the energy, ingenuity and sheer chutzpah of scrappy and resourceful artists. This may be especially true at the movies, where the technology of cinema can enhance and also complicate the artistry..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Spielberg’s version, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner that substantially revises Laurents’s book and new choreography by Justin Peck that pays shrewd tribute to Robbins’s genius, can’t be called flawless. The performances are uneven. The swooning romanticism of the central love story doesn’t always align with the roughness of the setting. The images occasionally swerve too bumpily from street-level naturalism to theatrical spectacle. The seams — joining past to present, comedy to tragedy, America to dreamland — sometimes show.But those seams are part of what makes the movie so exciting. It’s a dazzling display of filmmaking craft that also feels raw, unsettled and alive. Rather than embalming a classic with homage or aggressively reinventing it, Spielberg, Kushner, Peck and their collaborators (including the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, the production designer Adam Stockhausen, the editors Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn and the composers Jeanine Tesori and David Newman) have rediscovered its breathing, thrilling essence.The 1961 movie, directed by Robbins and Robert Wise, was partly filmed on location in a neighborhood that was already vanishing. In Spielberg’s 1957, the destruction is well underway. Wrecking balls and cranes tower over piles of smashed masonry that were once tenement buildings. A sign posted at one of the demolition sites shows a rendering of the shiny Lincoln Center arts complex that will rise where the slums once stood.This “West Side Story” is explicitly historical, grounded in a specific moment in New York City’s past. Kushner (whom I profiled in a recent issue of T, The New York Times Style Magazine) has brought a level of scholarly care to the screenplay far beyond what Laurents and the others were able or willing to muster.Shakespeare’s play supposes “two households, both alike in dignity”; in Act III, Mercutio famously calls down “a plague” on both of them. But such symmetry, while structurally necessary to the source material — who were the Montagues and Capulets, anyway, and who really cares? — doesn’t map easily onto the West Side as Kushner and Spielberg understand it.David Alvarez at center as Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, in the film.Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosThe Jets and the Sharks, a white teenage gang and their Puerto Rican antagonists, aren’t mirror images of each other. Ostensibly contending for control over a few battered blocks in the West 60s, they collide like taxis speeding toward each other on a one-way street.The Sharks are children of an upwardly striving, migrant working class, a generation (or less) removed from mostly rural poverty in the Caribbean and determined to find a foothold in the imperial metropolis, where they are greeted with prejudice and suspicion. Bernardo (David Alvarez), their leader, is a boxer. His girlfriend, Anita (Ariana DeBose), works as a seamstress, while his younger sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), toils on the night shift as a cleaner at Gimbels department store. Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera), who Bernardo and Anita believe would be a good match for Maria, is a bespectacled future accountant. (But of course Maria falls for Tony, a reluctant Jet played by the heartthrobby Ansel Elgort.) All of them have plans, aspirations, dreams. The violence of the streets is, for Bernardo, a necessary and temporary evil, something to be overcome through hard work and communal cohesion on the way to something better.The Jets, by contrast, are the bitter remnant of an immigrant cohort that has, for the most part, moved on — to the Long Island suburbs and the bungalows of Queens, to a share of postwar prosperity. As the policemen Officer Krupke (Brian D’Arcy James) and Lieutenant Schrank (Corey Stoll) are on hand to explain — and as the Jets themselves testify — these kids are the product of family dysfunction and societal neglect. Without aspirations for the future, they are held together by clannish loyalty and racist resentment — an empty sense of white entitlement and a perpetually expanding catalog of grievances. Their nihilism is embodied by Riff (the rangy Mike Faist), the kind of brawler who would rather fight than win.As the song says: “Life can be bright in America/If you can fight in America.” But what lingers after this “West Side Story” is a darkness that seems to belong more to our own angry, tribal moment than to the (relatively) optimistic ’50s or early ’60s. The heartbreak lands so heavily because the eruptions of joy are so heady. The big comic and romantic numbers — “Tonight,” “America” and, yes, “I Feel Pretty” — burst with color and feeling, and the silliness of “Officer Krupke” cuts like an internal satire of some of the show’s avowed liberal pieties.The cast members — notably including Rita Moreno, who was Anita in 1961 and who returns as a weary, wise pharmacist named Valentina — bring exactly the sincerity and commitment that a movie like this requires. There’s a reason “West Side Story” is a staple of the performing arts curriculum, and for all the Hollywood bells and whistles, the essence of Spielberg’s version is a bunch of kids snapping their fingers and singing their hearts out.The voices are, all in all, pretty strong. Zegler sings some of the most challenging numbers with full-throated authority, but she and Elgort don’t fully inhabit the grand, life-altering (and -ending) passion that their roles require. Tony and Maria are sweet and likable, but also a bit bland, and their whirlwind progress from infatuation to eternal devotion, which unfolds over a scant two days, feels shallow against the big, complicated forces moving around them.This is partly a consequence of Kushner and Spielberg’s commitment to realism and historical nuance, and in some ways it works to the movie’s advantage. The center of tragic gravity shifts away from Tony and Maria to Bernardo and Anita, and also to Riff. It helps that Alvarez, Faist and — supremely — DeBose are such magnetic performers. When DeBose is onscreen, nothing else matters but what Anita is feeling. But the characters also have a deeper, more complicated stake in the story. They aren’t just foils or catalysts for the action, as their counterparts are in Shakespeare. They are the ones for whom the question of what it is to be in America becomes a matter of life and death.West Side StoryRated PG-13. Never was a story of more woe. Running time: 2 hours 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Great ‘West Side Story’ Debate

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      With the Steven Spielberg film coming soon, three critics, a playwright and a theater historian weigh in on whether the musical deserves a new hearing — and how.Since its Broadway premiere in 1957, “West Side Story” — a musical based on “Romeo and Juliet” and created by four white men — has been at once beloved and vexing.The score, featuring such Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim classics as “Somewhere” and “Maria,” is considered one of the best in Broadway history. The cast album was a No. 1 smash. The 1961 movie won best picture and nine other Oscars. The show has been regularly revived, most recently on Broadway last year in a short-lived radical rethinking by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove. And now, this month, a movie remake by none other than Steven Spielberg.And yet, from the beginning, the show (directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Arthur Laurents) has discomfited some audience members and critics — for its violence, its mix of tones and, especially, for the way it underscores stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as gang members. Not to mention that the 1961 movie featured the white actress Natalie Wood playing the Latina role of Maria.Why does “West Side Story” continue to have such a large cultural footprint? Should it? Is it possible to be true to such richly emotional material and still be responsive to our moment?The dance-at-the-gym sequence in the new “West Side Story” film.20th Century StudiosWe asked five experts to weigh in: Jesse Green, the chief theater critic at The New York Times; Isabelia Herrera, a Times critic fellow; Carina del Valle Schorske, a contributing writer at the Times Magazine and the author of a 2020 Times Opinion piece challenging the show’s place in the culture; the Tony Award-winning playwright Matthew López (“The Inheritance”); and Misha Berson, the author of “Something’s Coming, Something Good: ‘West Side Story’ and the American Imagination.”They gathered before seeing the new film and just before news broke that Sondheim, the show’s lyricist and the last survivor from its creative team, had died at 91. Scott Heller, the interim editor of Arts & Leisure, kicked off the conversation, and it got going quickly from there.SCOTT HELLER What stays with you about the first time you saw “West Side Story”? Or the most memorable time?JESSE GREEN The first time I saw it was in a high school production featuring extremely clumsy dancing, warbly singing and an all-white (non-Latinx) cast. Memorable, but not in a good way. Luckily, I had already gotten to know it by then — from the music.MATTHEW LÓPEZ My relationship to “West Side Story” is a bit unusual in that my father was in the film as an extra. He’s clearly visible in the opening scene on the playground, just after the prologue. When I was perhaps 7, my parents showed it to me, and it was incredibly exciting to see my father at 14 years old. And it was the first time I’d ever seen any kind of popular entertainment with Puerto Rican characters. It was not until later that my relationship to the show changed. I saw the revival in 2009 (my first time seeing it onstage), and I was shocked at how thinly the Puerto Rican characters were drawn.MISHA BERSON I’m probably the one person here who saw the original — actually a Broadway tour that came through Detroit when I was 9 years old. I went with my dance class, and though it was something of a blur and I didn’t understand it much, I was captivated by the dancing, the music, the energy and excitement of the show. I became obsessed with it, but as an adult didn’t see another vibrant, fully realized production until the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle did an excellent revival in 2007.ISABELIA HERRERA Unfortunately, my memories are wrapped up in a microaggression that has stayed with me since high school. My family is Dominican, from the city of Santiago de los Caballeros, and I am likely one of the only kids of Dominican descent who attended my high school. I remember when, in English class, a white classmate reprimanded me for not having seen “West Side Story” at the time, saying, “But aren’t you Puerto Rican?!”A scene from “West Side Story” on Broadway, starring Chita Rivera, foreground, as Anita.John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesCARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKE Ugh, Isabelia, that’s such a familiar story! In a messed-up way, your classmate’s confusion makes sense, because the musical itself might just as well be about Dominicans — it’s that general. I first saw “West Side Story” on a VHS tape my mom and I rented from the public library when I was maybe 9 or 10. I grew up in California, away from my Puerto Rican family in Washington Heights, so I thought I might find something out about my culture that I didn’t know before. But nothing onscreen — beyond the latticework of fire escapes — reminded me of the people or neighborhood I knew from frequent visits to New York. I finished the movie feeling even more confused than I was before about what being Puerto Rican was supposed to mean — to me, and to the “average” American.“I finished the movie feeling even more confused than I was before about what being Puerto Rican was supposed to mean — to me, and to the ‘average’ American.”GREEN I’ve never seen musicals as documentaries. They often rely on stereotypes to make larger points than they could if they focused on specific, actual characteristics. Without the stereotypes, you probably couldn’t have ensembles. The question is whether the stereotypes are vile, destructive. As a white, non-Latinx person, I’m not the right person to judge that. But I would just say that the Jets are stereotyped, too, and, in the source material, so are the Veronese.BERSON Do you trust that everyone knows the source material is Shakespeare’s R&J? I wish I did!DEL VALLE SCHORSKE “The Jets are stereotyped, too,” but white teens are not harmed by such stereotypes because there have always been such a wealth of representations to choose from. And at the time of the musical’s debut, there wasn’t a general suspicion in the air that any white teen might be a gangster, so “West Side Story” wasn’t, for them, reinforcing an expectation of criminality that was already violently shaping the politics of the period.GREEN Would you say the Puerto Rican characters are less well characterized than the white ones: the Poles, Italians and others? My sense is that most characters in most musicals are poorly characterized in terms of their ethnic or racial or other identity because that’s not what those shows are really about. Don’t get me started on gay and Jewish stereotypes in musicals, which I guess I’m especially aware of as a gay Jew.BERSON The creators of the show, though they were all white men, were not simply oblivious to what actual Puerto Ricans were like in New York at the time. For instance, Jerome Robbins visited Puerto Rican youth dances and social gatherings, and tried to incorporate some of the popular dance movements he saw in his choreography. He also tried to recruit as many Latinx performers as possible, which was difficult because there were so few opportunities for them to get the Broadway experience and training the show demanded. Also, Bernstein had always loved and admired Latin music and tried to meld some of the rhythms into his score.“The creators of the show, though they were all white men, were not simply oblivious to what actual Puerto Ricans were like in New York at the time.”DEL VALLE SCHORSKE That’s interesting, about Robbins. I’m quite familiar with a broad range of Latin rhythms, and I don’t hear or see the influence — unless you’re counting the Spanish paso doble on the rooftop. I do love some of the choreography, especially the anxious, tightly coiled “Cool,” performed by the Jets. It’s good to know that someone was at least trying to do their homework after Sondheim confessed he’d “never even met a Puerto Rican.” In this conversation, I really hope we can move beyond the false binary: “documentary” versus “work of imagination.” Does a work of imagination really have to be so “superficial and sentimental,” which is how the Black Puerto Rican journalist Jesús Colón described West Side Story when it debuted?GREEN In musical theater, that isn’t a false binary. Some shows operate at a granular level, risking larger insignificance, and others work more broadly, risking stereotype. “West Side Story,” as Misha can tell us more definitively, was an idea looking for an ethnicity. And it does seem to me that in landing on Puerto Ricans vs. whites (instead of Jews vs. Catholics as originally imagined), it was taking advantage of a news hook of the time without any deep engagement in Puerto Rican-ness. I guess the question is whether it’s possible for a work to rise above that when it is primarily looking at the eternal paradigm of outsiders and insiders, and the tragedy of love that tries to cross those boundaries.Richard Beymer as Tony and Natalie Wood as Maria in the 1961 film, which won 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture.MGMBERSON That is “Romeo and Juliet,” Jesse, which one could say (as you indicated) had little to do with the actual Verona (which Shakespeare never visited) but still is a potent portrayal of love in the crossfire of hate. I also want to add that though characters in musicals tend not to be deeply complex and contoured, Bernardo and Anita are not portrayed simply as bad kids spoiling for a fight. They are more sympathetic than that, as leaders and lovers, at least to my understanding — in some ways more so than Jets members.And a moment of historical context may be helpful here: At the time of the show’s creation, there was national alarm about the growing “threat” of youth violence during the postwar malaise, and that was true of Black, Irish and other groups of kids. And there was also, among these liberal artists, a real concern about racial/ethnic prejudice and the rising backlash against immigrants of color. These things are still meaningful, and one of the reasons I think young people especially are still very much drawn to the material despite its flaws.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE I would be more sympathetic to the possibility of “West Side Story” rising above that fault if its creators, or re-creators, were not taking advantage of Puerto Ricans as the “news hook” for liberal street cred. If it’s supposed to be some universal and culturally interchangeable narrative, then it doesn’t get to count as a serious exploration of Puerto Rican or so-called Latinx life.GREEN I agree that “West Side Story” is not a serious exploration of those things. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a serious exploration of something else. I say this even though I don’t actually think it’s the greatest musical ever written; it has plenty of aesthetic flaws beyond the political ones we’re discussing. My love for it comes mostly from the way the songs tell the story — though I know that too is a point of contention. For me, Sondheim’s lyrics get at the twitchy excitement (and anger) of youth like nothing else in musical theater ever has — as do Bernstein’s polyrhythms and percussion, whatever their actual sonic origin.HELLER Matthew, I’m going to circle back to you, as a theater artist whose response to the material has changed over time. Among other things, you wrote a play about the play and its impact on a Puerto Rican family. Tell us about it — and was it informed by your new insights into where the original fell short?LÓPEZ The movie did spark my nascent creative brain as a piece of drama — the music, the dancing — and as cinema. Seeing the revival, though, I realized how much the Puerto Rican characters — and thereby the performers playing them — were not invited to the party, so to speak. A meal had been laid out and half the cast seemed left to go hungry. My family loved “West Side Story,” but as I thought about it, I realized their love for the show wasn’t reciprocated by it.All of this led me to begin writing “Somewhere,” which is set in the neighborhood that was ultimately destroyed to build Lincoln Center. A Puerto Rican family of dancers and performers who dream of being cast in “West Side Story” (or anything Jerome Robbins created) but who, by the realities of their situation, are only left dreaming. I think in some ways, I was attempting to tell the offstage story that you don’t see.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE Matthew, it seems like “Somewhere” shows us how to engage with a “canonical” work without reproducing its limitations. I’m interested in the way Puerto Rican artists have creatively navigated the musical’s constraints, but I’m also hungry for … anything else! In her memoir, Rita Moreno wrote about how difficult it was to find substantial roles after “West Side Story”: I’m kind of depressed by the fact that she’s still defined by the show in 2021. I mean, Moreno performed in plays by Lorraine Hansberry, she spent decades in psychoanalysis — doesn’t she deserve to grow?LÓPEZ I do have to cop to a bifurcated mind on this. There’s a part of me that really loves “West Side Story” and a part of me that really hates that I love “West Side Story.” I think Lin-Manuel Miranda once called it “a blessing and a curse,” which is a sentiment I understand.BERSON It makes total sense to have a conflicted opinion of the show, especially if it speaks to you so personally. It’s not equivalent, but as a Jewish woman, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” drives me up the wall! Meanwhile, I can readily imagine Latinx performers might both love and resent “West Side Story” — love the way it has given many employment and its exhilarating use of dancer-actor-singers, but resent it for all the reasons you, Carina and others have stated. Popular culture is often a double-edged sword that way.GREEN New work from new artists is the lifeblood of the theater. Yet engaging with the old ones, which were new once, can also be pleasurable and valuable — unless they have become the equivalent of Confederate statues that need to come down. Is “West Side Story” a Confederate statue? I don’t think so.“Is ‘West Side Story’ a Confederate statue? I don’t think so.”BERSON If we are now designating imperfect musicals as Confederate statues, I think that’s scary. “West Side Story” gets produced a lot because it can accommodate a teenage cast (there have been thousands of high school productions) and because it is a kind of cultural touchstone that still excites people. Confederate statues glorify bigotry and apartheid. There’s a difference.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE Audiences are taught what should resonate with them — nothing becomes a “cultural touchstone” by accident — and the more a certain narrative gets repeated, the more sentimental associations it accrues. “West Side Story” might not be a Confederate monument, but it is a monument to the authority of white Americans to dominate the conversation about who Puerto Ricans are. And each revival renews that authority and co-signs the narrative for a new generation.GREEN All art is political, yes, and deserves to be judged as such. But art is not just political, and deserves to be judged on other grounds, too. If there is no pleasure to be had in “West Side Story” then it cannot possibly overcome the problems we’re discussing. But if it does offer pleasure, then we, as individuals, are free to weigh it against those problems. The balance will be different for different people, not necessarily corresponding with identity.The most recent Broadway revival, directed by Ivo van Hove, featured video projections. It was critically divisive and had a short run, in part because of the pandemic.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHELLER Matthew, you and I had some provocative back-and-forths about critical responses to “The Inheritance” and its depictions of the gay community, and you were good enough to write a piece for us, in which you made this point: “No one piece of writing about our complex, sprawling community will ever tell the entire story, and I believe that is a good thing: It creates an unquenchable thirst for more and more narratives.” Does that hold for “West Side Story” as well?LÓPEZ I don’t think it’s an apt comparison. “The Inheritance” is a gay play written by a gay man whereas “West Side Story” is purported to be about Puerto Ricans and was written by white men. And while there are heterosexual characters in “The Inheritance,” they aren’t serving the same dramatic function in my play that the Puerto Rican characters do in “West Side Story.” And I used the word “function” purposefully, for that is what they feel in the story. I’d love to see a “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”-style rethinking one day.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE I agree that any future engagement with “West Side Story” that actually deepens the material would have to abandon all loyalty to the show as written, the way “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” completely reimagines “Hamlet.” It’s an independent work of art that deconstructs the canonical play. I doubt the creators of “West Side Story” gave a single thought to “new narratives” that might emerge from their musical, let alone new Puerto Rican narratives. And it doesn’t seem like the power brokers of Broadway or Hollywood are really thirsting for them, otherwise the same material wouldn’t get recycled over and over.HELLER So we are getting to the Spielberg movie.HERRERA I’m also skeptical of how much the thirst for new narratives comes from a genuine place, rather than a response to an industry that is clearly grappling with questions of racism and struggling to navigate critiques about representation. Honestly, I think there is something sinister about capitalizing on the nostalgia of a Hollywood artifact, casting an all-Latinx Sharks cast, while still using the liberal language of “inclusion” and “diversity” as armor against critique. The fact that “West Side Story” is being remade with these issues in mind doesn’t necessarily absolve it of its original missteps.BERSON So is there no place for “West Side Story,” even with the best of intentions? Does that mean there’s no place for “Othello” or “Merchant of Venice,” which are problematic but still dramatically vital works? Can we still see the show, or not see it, and have fruitful debate about it?DEL VALLE SCHORSKE I’m not advocating the wholesale erasure of “West Side Story.” I’m saying, let’s stop pouring literally hundreds of millions of dollars into propping up its relevance, and let’s stop minimizing its flaws.HERRERA Misha, I think we can certainly still have a fruitful debate about it! When discussions around colorism mushroomed online surrounding the film adaptation of “In the Heights,” I mentioned in our roundtable that criticism emerges from a place of love — a desire to make art, life and politics better. I don’t see these critiques as mutually exclusive.BERSON That is very well said. And just my awareness of the politics of librettist Arthur Laurents and composer Leonard Bernstein especially — who were both blacklisted in the ’50s for their civil rights and other activism — makes me think they would probably share some of these concerns and find them meaningful. But the show has intrinsic artistic power, and I think will survive. It is encouraging to me that someone with the skill and sensitivity of Tony Kushner is the screenwriter/adapter. I hope it’s great, and I hope it’s the last!HELLER Do others hope the remake is great?HERRERA I don’t know if there is such a thing as a great remake, but I’m certainly hoping this version releases its grip on stereotypes, offers its more underdeveloped characters a bit of autonomy and perhaps provides more texture about the actual life and experiences of Puerto Rican migration at the time. And please, give us at least a few songs with actual Afro-Caribbean rhythms! A plena take on “I Feel Pretty”?GREEN Authenticity isn’t the goal; if “Hamilton” were authentic, it would be mostly minuets. I want the new movie of “West Side Story” to succeed if it’s good, if it manages to move people. But if only white people are moved, it will be a failure.LÓPEZ I’m excited to see what Spielberg, Kushner and [the choreographer Justin] Peck do with the material for a 21st-century audience. It’s a perfect opportunity to honor what’s glorious about the show, and address what is flawed.DEL VALLE SCHORSKE I want it to flop so we can move on. More

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      When Bernstein Conducted Stravinsky, Modern Music Came Alive

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      A box set of recordings pairs Stravinsky, 50 years after his death, with the conductor who championed his works.On April 6, 1971, a balmy spring day in New Haven, Conn., I arrived at the main building of the Yale School of Music a little late for a piano lesson. But I stopped at the front door. Someone had tacked up a small white note card: “Igor Stravinsky died today.”Those four words staggered me. Stravinsky had been central to the entire span of 20th-century music thus far. His “Rite of Spring,” from 1913, had been part of the creation of modernism — what seemed like ancient history. Yet in an analysis class that very semester in 1971, we were studying the score of what was still quite a new piece — his extraordinary “Requiem Canticles,” from 1966 — trying to understand the ways he had adapted 12-tone technique to his own ends. He seemed almost to embody the entirety of modern music and its various styles. What would happen now that he was gone?I’d been a Stravinsky fan since my early teens, when I listened over and over to the recording he conducted of his “Firebird.” The closest I came to him in person was in the spring of 1966. I had just graduated from high school and was attending all the programs of a Stravinsky festival presented by the New York Philharmonic. The final concert ended with the composer leading a performance of his “Symphony of Psalms.” I can’t tell you how many musicians I’ve met since then who have envied me for being there that day.Stravinsky was in the audience for the first program, which was conducted by Leonard Bernstein and ended with “The Rite of Spring.” Even today, that piece still has the power to shock. Back then, when it was not as familiar, the music seemed truly mind-blowing, especially in Bernstein’s mysterious and volcanic, yet somehow cohesive and eerily beautiful performance.During the ovation, Stravinsky, who was seated at the front of the first tier, stood up, smiled and gestured his thanks to Bernstein and the orchestra musicians. During intermission he had remained in his seat, and ushers kept students like me away. But I got close enough to wave at him eagerly; I think he saw me.Stravinsky and Bernstein were linked in my mind: the world’s greatest living composer and his greatest (and certainly most famous) champion. That reputation has lingered: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stravinsky’s death, Sony has released a box set pairing these two artists.Yet Bernstein’s Stravinsky discography is actually frustratingly small; the Sony set contains only six discs. Even in the concert hall, Bernstein did not conduct the range of Stravinsky works he might have — unlike the comprehensive approach he took to, for example, the symphonies of Mahler.Bernstein recording Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall in 1972.Sony Music EntertainmentStravinsky was central to much of the span of the 20th century and its music.Sam Falk/The New York TimesBernstein was one of Stravinsky’s greatest (and certainly most famous) conductor champions.Sam Falk/The New York TimesStarting in the 1950s, when Stravinsky was still a challenging composer for most audiences, Bernstein led accounts of pieces that clearly compelled him, especially the “The Rite of Spring” and “The Firebird,” as well as seminal works from Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical period, like Symphony in Three Movements, the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, Symphony of Psalms and more.The “Rite,” Bernstein’s signature piece, kept turning up, even on one of his Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, in 1958, which opened with Haydn’s Symphony No. 104, followed by the Stravinsky. Bernstein must have thought that you might as well start students early on the “Rite” and show them what “classical” music could really sound like. Can you imagine that being presented as an educational program today?A couple of the recordings in the Sony set are classics, including two accounts of the “Rite”: Bernstein’s original 1958 version with the Philharmonic, and his reconsidered, still molten, yet more weighty and heaving account from 1972 with the London Symphony Orchestra.The revelation, for me, is a disc that pairs two lesser-known recordings: “Symphony of Psalms,” from 1972, with the London Symphony Orchestra and the English Bach Festival Chorus, and the opera-oratorio “Oedipus Rex,” recorded later that year with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, some excellent singers (including the tenor René Kollo as Oedipus and the mezzo-soprano Tatiana Troyanos as Jocasta) and the Harvard Glee Club. That “Oedipus” was recorded at Symphony Hall in Boston, in conjunction with the Norton Lectures that Bernstein delivered at Harvard in 1973.In the sixth and final of those lectures, “The Poetry of Earth,” Bernstein discusses the intentional stylistic incongruities in Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical works, singling out “Symphony of Psalms,” scored unusually for four-part chorus and an orchestra with just lower strings (no violins or violas), woodwinds (except for clarinets), brass and percussion, including two pianos. The chorus sings Latin versions of three psalm texts; the music looks back to the heritage of sacred vocal works, yet through an austere contemporary prism. The first movement, a setting of verses from Psalm 38 (“Hear my prayer, O Lord”), is a “prayer with teeth in it, a prayer made of steel,” Bernstein said in his lecture. “It violates our expectations, shatters us with its irony.”Bernstein brings those qualities to life in his recording, right from what he called the “brusque, startling, pistol-shot of a chord” that opens the movement, immediately followed by “some kind of Bachian finger exercises.” The tempo is daringly reined in. The instrumental textures are dark and weighty, yet remain dry and lucid. The choristers sound solemn and stoic on the surface, but a pleading, almost desperate edge to their singing comes through.The whole performance evolves in this manner, with Bernstein focusing on Stravinsky’s tart, hard-edge harmonies, even in the gravely beautiful slow second movement. Stravinsky’s counterintuitive choral setting of the word “alleluia,” which opens the third movement with chords that sound yearning and almost hopeless, comes across with affecting poignancy. At first I thought Bernstein might have gone too far with his approach — that the performance overall comes close to plodding. Not so. It’s now my favorite version.Bernstein, recording “Oedipus Rex,” maintained a grave tone throughout the score.Sony Music EntertainmentBernstein made the “Oedipus Rex” recording essentially so that he could use it to demonstrate some points in that final Norton lecture about stylistic misalliances. He argued that in composing this take on ancient Greek tragedy — which uses a Latin translation of Jean Cocteau’s French version — Stravinsky somehow found resonances with Verdi, specifically “Aida.” That might seem incongruous, Bernstein said. But what matters, he went on to explain, was that somewhere deep in Stravinsky’s consciousness “the basic metaphor contained in ‘Aida’ registered, stuck, and connected with the corresponding deep metaphor in ‘Oedipus Rex.’”The “Oedipus” score begins with a four-note motif, thickly harmonized by chorus and orchestra, in which the people of Thebes implore Oedipus to save the city from a deadly plague. Bernstein, in his lecture, convincingly links that motif to a pleading phrase sung by Aida, beseeching the princess Amneris, her captor and rival in love, to have pity on her.Bernstein’s performance of this opening blast is emphatic and anguished, and significantly slower than in Stravinsky’s own recording. Bernstein maintains that grave tone throughout the score, making the most of the passages with winding Verdian lyricism; juicing every crunchy chord; and, when called for, letting the chorus and orchestra flail away with clipped rhythmic intensity.The Sony box also offers bracingly crisp performances of the chamber work “L’Histoire du Soldat” and the Octet for Wind Instruments, which Bernstein recorded with players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1947. I also love the accounts of the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, with Seymour Lipkin as the piano soloist, and “Petrushka” (the 1947 version) with the New York Philharmonic. (As a bonus, there is also a recording of Bernstein discussing Stravinsky and his “Petrushka” ballet.)As it turned out, my last direct encounter with Bernstein also involved the “Rite.” In the summer of 1987 at Tanglewood, three years before his death, he spent a week rehearsing a large orchestra of college-age players for a performance of the piece. Though the rehearsals were closed to the public, I was then a freelance critic at The Boston Globe and was permitted to watch. At times I even sat onstage, behind the players, so I could see Bernstein as he faced them.Bernstein in rehearsal at Tanglewood in the summer of 1987.Heinz H. Weissenstein/Whitestone Photo, via BSO ArchivesThese gifted young artists could barely believe that the most celebrated classical musician in the world was teaching them — and this, of all pieces. Though he was infamous for being overly emotional, a gusher of enthusiasm, Bernstein in rehearsal was precise, exacting and impressively specific with his descriptions of the music. In one restless passage for the bassoons, Bernstein found the playing too jittery and playful.“It’s not a fanfare,” he said. “Ever heard a Russian choir singing in elongated notes?”That was the deep, resonant sound and character that he wanted. And the players got it. During the “Spring Rounds” section, he said that the music had to be “an assortment of groans and wails and troll sounds.” His words elicited collective nods, and the orchestra’s playing came alive. It was ominous and wild, without a trace of caricature. More