Leonard Bernstein at Carnegie Hall, between 1946 and 1948. Photo by William P. Gottlieb, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Saturday, 13 November 1943, Town Hall, New York. The mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel puts I Hate Music on her programme, five songs written by a twenty-five-year-old who for a few months has been assistant conductor at the Philharmonic. After the recital there is a party at the singer’s home. The young man gets back late and, according to the reconstruction preserved by the Library of Congress, goes to bed around four. A few hours later, on Sunday morning, the telephone wakes him. It is Bruno Zirato, of the orchestra’s management. Bruno Walter has the flu. The concert is at 3 pm, and the podium is Leonard Bernstein’s.
The chain of responsibility was short. Artur Rodziński, the music director, was out of town, at his house in Massachusetts, and had chosen Bernstein as his assistant just that summer: an assistant exists for a morning like this one. Nobody thought of a rehearsal. There was no time, and perhaps not even the idea. Bernstein went to Walter, who received him wrapped in blankets and pointed out some passages in the most treacherous score of the afternoon, Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote. Then, right before the concert, he went over the difficult spots with the two soloists, the cellist Joseph Schuster and the violist William Lincer, and with the concertmaster. The programme was Walter’s, intact: the overture to Schumann’s Manfred, Miklós Rózsa’s Theme, Variations and Finale, Strauss’s tone poem, the prelude to Die Meistersinger. In the accounts Bernstein gave of that day there is also a pharmacy detail: the pharmacist at Carnegie Hall offered him pills for his nerves, and he decided to go onto the podium without them.
It went well, and everyone knows that. But a young conductor replacing a sick conductor is an ordinary fact of musical life: it happens every season, in some city, and usually ends up as a line in the news. That afternoon had one more circumstance, and it was a microphone. The Philharmonic’s Sunday concerts went out on the CBS national network, and the one on 14 November had a sponsor, the United States Rubber Company. In the hall were Bernstein’s parents, Sam and Jennie, and his eleven-year-old brother. Outside the hall was anyone in America who had a radio tuned to that station. So the substitution had witnesses scattered across the country, people who had heard with their own ears an unknown name conduct Strauss without a rehearsal.
The next day came the printed confirmation. The New York Times put the news on the front page: “Young Aide Leads Philharmonic; Steps In When Bruno Walter Is Ill.” It was 1943, America was at war, and the country’s great orchestras were run by conductors born in Europe: Walter was a Berliner and an exile, Rodziński a Pole born in Split. A boy from Massachusetts who held the Philharmonic in his hands, in everyone’s hearing, was a story the country wanted to hear, and the radio had told it live before any newspaper could write it.
This is also why the legend has a material support. The broadcast of that afternoon has survived, and the Library of Congress has entered it in the National Recording Registry, in the 2011 selection, the list of recordings that the United States considers heritage to be preserved. Only the last piece of the concert is missing. The prelude to Die Meistersinger, which Bernstein conducted to close, did not go on the air.