by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago, on the last evening Charles and I had
together, we watched a couple of programs about classical music and a feature
film. One of the classical music programs was the legendary
November 14, 1954 CBS Omnibus broadcast
dealing with the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 — one of those
ubiquitous pieces even people who don’t know much about classical music would
recognize from its famous dum-dum-dum-daah “three G’s and an E-flat” opening. Omnibus was a CBS cultural program that aired Sunday afternoons
and occasionally ran such high-culture items as this and the only time John
Coltrane ever appeared on American commercial television, as part of the Miles
Davis group (the same unit that recorded Kind of Blue, but without Cannonball Adderley) playing “So What,”
following which the show brought on the Gil Evans orchestra to play three of
their band arrangements with Miles. The November 14, 1954 show was Leonard
Bernstein, looking shockingly young with thick black hair and a skinny bod and
baby face (by the time of the Young People’s Concerts I watched regularly as a kid he’d already gone grey-haired
and his face was beginning to take on the leathery appearance he’d have for the
rest of his life), showing the process of “How a Great Symphony Was Written” by
going over the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, using some of the
sketches Beethoven wrote for that movement but decided not to use, and
essentially demonstrating the rightness of Beethoven’s choices.
For his
demonstration Bernstein conducted an orchestra called the Symphony of the Air,
which was actually the final incarnation of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony;
when the symphony’s sponsor, General Motors, decided to cancel their
sponsorship once Toscanini announced his retirement at the end of the 1953-54
season, the orchestra members decided to continue on their own, organizing as
the Symphony of the Air, forming their own nonprofit to raise money and run the
business end, and recruiting Bernstein as their first regular conductor. The
orchestra did O.K. for the next few years (among other things, they recorded a
complete cycle of Beethoven’s piano concerti with Artur Rubinstein as soloist
and Josef Krips conducting for their old label, RCA Victor) but ultimately
disbanded in 1963. An allmusic.com Web entry on them, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/symphony-of-the-air-mn0000155381,
attributes their quick fall from grace to McCarthyite blacklisting, which began
with “character assassination by disaffected orchestra members,
including one who was fired for drunken and immoral actions on the first tour
and others who objected to the orchestra’s hiring Black and women players.” The
schtick of this program was that
Bernstein took the two surviving sketchbooks of Beethoven’s that contain
elements used in the Fifth Symphony and picked out the sketches that had
apparently been intended for the first movement but not used, and plugged them
into where Bernstein guessed Beethoven would have put them. The idea was that
Beethoven, more than any other composer in history, had a special knack for knowing
“what the next note has to be,”
but he put himself through the tortures of the damned trying to figure out what
that was and he didn’t know it himself until he actually wrote it down and saw
whether or not it would fit. (I say “saw” rather than “heard” because by this
time Beethoven was almost completely deaf and he had to rely on his aural
imagination to tell him what a piece of music — his own or anybody else’s —
would sound like from the handwritten or printed score.)
Both Charles and I
knew this material from the LP Bernstein later re-recorded of it, though the
writing of his narration was tighter and more insightful on the record than it
was on this earlier TV version, and some of the things he said on TV required
the visual medium to back them up. One of the most telling points he made was
that Beethoven’s manuscripts reveal the torment of his inner journey; they’re
hastily scribbled and full of cross-outs, and at one point he ran out of room
on his music paper for the final version of a passage he’d crossed out several
times and wrote the one he wanted at the bottom of the page “as a sort of
footnote, leaving his copyists to figure out what he meant,” Bernstein said. “I
admire and pity those copyists.” Then Bernstein showed a page of a Stravinsky
score, written meticulously and flawlessly — he could have used Wagner as well;
with his typical egomania, Wagner seems to have treated his scores as if they
would be museum pieces one day, and it’s obvious that both he and Stravinsky
made their fair copies themselves instead of entrusting the task of figuring
out what they really meant to
those admirable and pitiable copyists. Anyway, I’ve always been fascinated by
this presentation since I heard it on LP (coupled on the back side with Bruno
Walter’s mono New York Philharmonic recording of the complete Beethoven Fifth;
the Omnibus presentation ends
with Bernstein leading the Symphony of the Air in a start-to-finish performance
of the first movement as Beethoven ultimately determined it; there’s a CD
edition of the recording but it’s not as useful as it could be because
Bernstein recorded the narration in German, French and Italian as well as
English, and since the recording was mono the people who produced the CD
decided to run each version as a separate mono track, which means that unless
your stereo can separate the channels perfectly you can’t hear any one version without getting
cross-talk from the other), and actually seeing it was a treat, even though we’d got so used to the
old, grizzled Bernstein it’s a shock to see him here and realize that once he
really was that young.
