2023, are you done yet? 2023, I knew about these things already, but only when they happened to others. Now you have brought them to my door. 2023, you can’t make me jaded. Not yet. 2023, we watch the world tear itself apart. It keeps getting worse, but records are made to be broken.
2023, you gave me a movie about Leonard Bernstein, filling out the movie about Leonard Bernstein I had in my head. I remember my freshman year in high school, I was taking a course called “Physical Science,” which really meant science for fuckups. We sang REM, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” but a fellow fuckup at my table thought the shout out to Leonard Bernstein was “Let Her Birds Die.” Her birds did not die, not for me. At 15, Bernstein already loomed large. Teacher supreme, and on television no less, where we were all his students. I still love watching him wax rhapsodic about the 12 tone scale in Debussy, or be knocked out by The Beatles, talking of time signatures and modes that did not mean to happen. Bernstein wasn’t even bothered that the chromaticism of Tin Pan Alley was becoming more primitive with the simple triads of rock and roll. One would not wipe out the other. He didn’t know it, but a chromatic bounty would return with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan. Bernstein, the maestro, who knew all—we were all young people in his presence—was not a snob. He thought most of what was on the radio was real junk, but around 5 percent was marvelous. And that was 1967.
Bradley Cooper cowrote, directed , and starred in Maestro, not a biopic, but moments of Bernstein. Like many of us, I wondered why Bernstein couldn’t make more wonderful works like Fancy Free, On the Town, West Side Story—I mean, good lord—and Candide. Bernstein had to be up there conducting other people’s music. He was great at it—some musicians complained he was performing for the audience and not conducting the musicians, though this was later in the game, when he was no longer Peak Lenny—but there are many great conductors and only one writer who could have written those masterpieces. He wanted to be a Renaissance Man, and this was not to our benefit. But his ego dragged him down. Many great artists had egos that did not stop the work. But Bernstein needed to be loved by everyone all the time. It was too much for Mrs. Bernstein—the long suffering Felicia, played, stunningly, by Carey Mulligan—but he gave us what he gave us. Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics to West Side Story at 25, thought that “Maria” and “Somewhere” weren’t really songs. They were concert pieces. It was hard to tell if he meant that as a compliment, but perhaps there are many great songs that are concert pieces. Schubert or Mahler lieder? Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige? The Beatles, A Day in the Life? Joni Mitchell, “Paprika Plains?” Lou Reed, “Street Hassle?” Elvis Costello, The Juliet Letters? Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool? There are so many songs that are more than songs. Maestro is a gone world. It is easier to be gay, but could anyone get on television talking about music at that level? How many are talking about it anywhere? Lydia Tár? But she’s fictional, and if you saw the movie, you know how that worked out. When Bernstein was writing the music for West Side Story and Candide at the same time—can you imagine?—he was brimming. His cup runnethed over. Later, he lost his magic. The conducting was still great—How could it not be? Always with the world’s greatest orchestras—but when he put pen to paper, he was no longer God. Will anyone stage a revival of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? He didn’t even allow a soundtrack. Cooper’s film showed a life so tumultuous, it was a miracle the great work got made at all.
2023, you gave us Paul Simon with a masterpiece with one good ear. He thought he had packed it in until a voice interrupted his slumber to tell him he was writing something called Seven Psalms, a cycle of songs, where the ambition wasn’t to create a new genre but to speak to enduring after 80 and what could come next—or not. He thought he was out, but they kept pulling him back in. The muse kept at him, after the farewell albums and tours. When the muse deserted him, Philip Roth posted a note on his fridge: THE STRUGGLE WITH WRITING IS OVER. Simon lost his hearing in his left ear, first gradually, then suddenly. Live performance would be a challenge, but the writing still proliferates, and his voice and his eloquence are still intact. When he spoke of his hearing crisis—I cannot even imagine how that felt—he told a reporter, “I still look pretty good, don’t I?” Seven Psalms was released as a single 33 minute track. “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows, until the real deal came.”