Today’s Boston’s “The Arts Fuse” carries an investigative piece of mine exploring how the Boston Symphony trustees decided not to hire Leonard Bernstein as the orchestra’s Music Director in 1949 even though he was the chosen successor of Serge Koussevitzky. This story is not irrelevant to the current controversy over the termination of Andris Nelsons, or the Chicago Symphony’s decision to engage Klaus Makela. I append an excerpt from my piece (itself excerpted from a book-in-progress on Leonard Bernstein and cultural leadership). You can read the whole thing here.
The current controversy over the termination of Andris Nelsons as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra – an immensely consequential decision — . . . brings to mind an even more consequential decision by the BSO leadership, a decision that has never been scrutinized. In 1949, Serge Koussevitzky — who had led the orchestra for 25 years, had created the Tanglewood summer festival as a singular American musical laboratory, had consolidated a mission and identity unique in the symphonic world — wished to pass the baton to his 31-year-old protégé Leonard Bernstein. But the board opted for Charles Munch, a stranger to American music and a poor fit for Tanglewood as Koussevitzky – a visionary – had envisioned it. . . .
The logic of a Bernstein appointment seemed apparent. With the Boston Symphony already committed to the American composer, Bernstein could pick up where Koussevitzky left off – and in the process add composers like Ives and Gershwin not to Koussevitzky’s taste. Compared to Koussevitzky’s orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, where Bernstein would wind up, was an inferior instrument, defective in polish and morale (and Bernstein was not an orchestra builder). Its eventual hall, at Lincoln Center, was inferior to Boston’s. Its audience was less attentive. Its artistic identity was erratic and vague. And it did not possess a summer home, let alone a Tanglewood. . . .
Henry Higginson, who invented the Boston Symphony in 1881, was a trained musician, schooled in Vienna. When he went shopping for a conductor during his 38 years operating the orchestra (there was no board), Higginson relied on trusted scouts abroad. The lists of candidates that he compiled were comprehensive and shrewd. Eavesdropping on the BSO board privately mulling Koussevitzky’s successor, one encounters a startling insularity – Cabot and the others evinced no knowledge of European musical life. . . .
In Boston, Leonard Bernstein might have sustained Serge Koussevitzky’s bold adventure – and changed the course of American classical music. Today’s Boston Symphony is adrift.
P.S. — Stay tuned for a blog about Henry Higginson and how to hire a Music Director.
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