Composer, conductor, educator, and humanitarian Leonard Bernstein transformed the way Americans and people everywhere hear and appreciate music. Bernstein’s successes as a composer ranged from the Broadway stage—including the musicals West Side Story, On the Town, Wonderful Town, and Candide—to concert halls all over the world, where his orchestral and choral music continues to thrive. His major concert works include three symphonies—No. 1, “Jeremiah” (1942); No. 2, “The Age of Anxiety” (1949); and No. 3, “Kaddish”—as well as Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs (1949); Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) for violin, strings, harp, and percussion (1954); Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1960); Chichester Psalms (1965); Mass (1971); Songfest (1977); Divertimento for Orchestra (1980); Halil for solo flute and small orchestra (1981); Touches (1981) and 13 Anniversaries (1988) for solo piano; Missa Brevis for singers and percussion (1988); Concerto for Orchestra: Jubilee Games (1989); and Arias and Barcarolles (1988). Bernstein also wrote the one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti in 1951, and its sequel, the three-act opera A Quiet Place, in 1983. He collaborated with choreographer Jerome Robbins on three major ballets: Fancy Free (1944), Facsimile (1946), and Dybbuk (1974). He received an Academy Award nomination for his score for On the Waterfront (1954).
As a conductor, Bernstein was a dynamic presence on the podiums of the world’s greatest orchestras for almost half a century, building a legacy that endures and continues to grow through a catalogue of more than 500 recordings and filmed performances. Bernstein became music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958, a position he held until 1969. He was subsequently named a permanent laureate conductor, and made frequent guest appearances with the orchestra. Bernstein also enjoyed special relationships with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Vienna Philharmonic, both of which he conducted extensively in live performances and recordings. He won 11 Emmy Awards for his celebrated television work, including the Emmy award–winning series of Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. As a teacher and performer, he played an active role with the Tanglewood Festival from its founding in 1940 until his death, as well as with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute and Pacific Music Festival (both of which he helped found), and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival.
Bernstein received many honors, including the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal (1985), Edward MacDowell Medal (1987), medals from the Beethoven Society and Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft, New York City’s Handel Medallion, a Special Tony Award (1969), dozens of honorary degrees and awards from colleges and universities, and national honors from Austria, Italy, Israel, Mexico, Denmark, Germany, and France. In 1985, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences honored Bernstein with the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award. His writings included The Joy of Music (1959), Young People’s Concerts (1961), The Infinite Variety of Music (1966), and Findings (1982). As the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Bernstein also delivered six lectures at Harvard University in 1972–1973 that were subsequently published and televised as The Unanswered Question. In 1990, he received the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Arts Association, awarded for lifetime achievement in the arts.
Samuel Pisar (1929–2015) was 10 years old when Hitler and Stalin carved up his native Poland during World War II. After nearly six years of Soviet occupation and Nazi enslavement in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, he escaped from Dachau and was liberated by the US Army. At age 16, he was one of the youngest survivors of the camps, and the only one of his family and school. Retrieved from the ruins of Germany by French and Australian relatives, he resumed his education in Paris, graduated with honors from the University of Melbourne, and earned doctorates from Harvard University and the Sorbonne. In the late 1950s, he began his career as an international lawyer at the United Nations before becoming an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, the US State Department, and committees of the Senate and House of Representatives. In 1961, he was awarded US citizenship by a special Act of Congress.
At the height of the Cold War, he was one of the first to urge broader economic, cultural, and human ties between East and West, helping to inspire Germany’s Ostpolitik and America’s policy of détente. A defender of freedom and human rights, he took up the causes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, and liberated other political dissidents from jails and gulags. In the 1970s, he was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A member of American, British, and French bars, Pisar counseled governments, corporations, banks, the International Olympic Committee, and personalities who ranged from Steve Jobs to Elizabeth Taylor. He presided at numerous international conferences on law, trade, and diplomacy, and addressed world leaders at the Davos Economic Forum, International Monetary Fund, Nobel Foundation, European Parliament, German Bundestag, and Vienna’s Town Hall during Austria’s celebration of its millennium. Founder and chairman of Yad Vashem France, trustee of Washington’s Brookings Institution, and member of Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, he was also an ambassador and special envoy of UNESCO.
His books include Coexistence and Commerce, which “charts an enlightened course for Western policy” (Senator Edward Kennedy); Of Blood and Hope, which has been called “the best book about the terrible years of Nazi terror” (Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky); and The Human Resource, which “brings hope of a new Renaissance, a new humanism that integrates and transcends the preceding ones” (French Prime Minister Edgar Faure). A recipient of many academic and civic distinctions, Pisar was a Grand Officer of the French Legion of Honor, an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, a Commander of Poland’s Order of Merit, and an Officer of the Order of Australia.
Bernstein’s genius has fascinated me since 1961, when he ushered in Washington’s enchanted Camelot era with his Fanfare for the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy. “Lenny” was already a revered conductor and composer, and I a junior adviser to the president with unlikely Auschwitz and Harvard credentials and lofty ambitions to help contain the nuclear confrontation between East and West. Years later, he would welcome me to his inner circle thanks to my mélomane wife, Judith Pisar, who was also his devoted disciple and friend.
But the possibility that I, too, might make music with him was beyond my wildest imagination. In 1989, he startled me with an invitation to participate in a concert marking the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, broadcast globally by the BBC from Warsaw’s opera house. On that occasion, he conducted classical works performed by international virtuosos interspersed with my evocation of salient wartime events through the prism of a living witness. This healing musical happening, which brought together former allies and foes, occurred at a time when history was accelerating at a vertiginous pace. By Christmas, Bernstein was able to conduct, near the ruins of the Berlin Wall, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with Schiller’s libretto renamed “Ode to Freedom” for the occasion.
In the last months of Bernstein’s life, our attention shifted to “Kaddish,” his Third Symphony. “Kaddish“ was first perfomed in 1963 by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In the wake of the assassination, Bernstein dedicated the work to “the beloved memory of John F. Kennedy.” But dissatisfied with his own rather iconoclastic speaker’s text, he turned for help to America’s poet laureate Robert Lowell and other eminent literati. The strange idea that I could bring a stronger and more authentic voice to his music came to him while reading my memoir, Of Blood and Hope.
Shortly before his death, in 1990, Bernstein told me that his libretto lacked signficance because he had never suffered directly. “You have endured in body and soul the most tragic chapter of our history,“ he said. “You must write a new narrative rooted in your suffering and rebirth.” Stunned, I answered that my poetic talents were unequal to his music; that I could not recite in public the devastation of my people, my family, and my childhood; and that I was not prepared to revisit my once stormy relationship with the Almighty over His perplexing passivity at that cursed time.
In the years that followed, the memory of the Holocaust continued to fade, along with its last survivors. Soon history would speak about it with the impersonal voice of scholars and novelists, not to say the malevolent register of falsifiers and demagogues. Such somber meditations forced me to rethink my decision. But only in 2001, after the terrorist attacks on America and other continents raised the specter of a newly destabilized world, did I start writing my Kaddish.
A text worthy of the Bernstein score, Kennedy’s heritage, and the Hebrews’ noble prayer for the dead seemed way out of my reach. I also realized that to make the symphony universal, riveting, and relevant, I would have to re-immerse myself in the nightmarish memories of the greatest catastrophe ever perpetrated by man against man.
Having fought in my adolescence a Homeric duel with fate for physical survival, I now found myself wrestling with the angels spiritually, like the biblical Jacob, trying to understand and transmit what I had learned about the folly of man and the mystery of God in the course of my odyssey.
If my text opens with a vehement disputation, it is because calling the Lord to account is less frowned upon in the Jewish tradition than in any other. Sure, my quarrel with Him was more palpable than Bernstein’s, and less grating on the orthodox sensibilities of rabbis, priests, or imams. But it emanated from the same rebellion against human barbarity and divine equanimity. In tune with Bernstein’s prescribed tempos and atonal melodies, I close with a tender reconciliation. The ritual Kaddish—essentially an ode to life, peace, and the Glory of God—I leave untouched to be chanted in the original Aramaic by the choruses and the soprano solo.
My oration, meant by Bernstein to be the vertebral spine of the symphony, reaches its climax with a lullaby about our merciful Lord, Who would always protect and comfort us in need. This melody evokes the one that my beloved grandmother used to sing to me, before her voice was silenced in the ovens of Treblinka.
At that moment, I feel as if I am actually reciting the ancient, liturgical Kaddish for her, my family, my people, and all vulnerable peoples decimated by mass slaughters and other crimes against humanity. After the soprano intones the religious dirge, my secular jeremiad against mankind’s relapse into a new genocidal and fratricidal era subsides to affirm the triumph of life and hope over the forces of darkness. In the luminous finale, all instruments and voices join me in a crescendo for racial and religious solidarity among the so-called “sworn enemies of history.”
The effort to convey, on the wings of Bernstein’s soaring music, my intimate recollections from the past, insights into the present, and premonitions about the future has been as emotionally harrowing as it is artistically exalting.
—Samuel Pisar