Lonely Music

The moment bright young (30) Leonard Bernstein finished reading Poet W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety, "a baroque eclogue" in a Third Avenue bar (TIME, July 21, 1947), he felt a "compulsion" to compose a symphony based on it. For two years, on his busy rounds of baton waving and piano playing, he scribbled away from Taos to Tel Aviv, "in planes, in hotel lobbies." Last week Lennie's Symphony No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra was ready.

As Boston's matinee audience filed into Symphony Hall for a first hearing, Lennie was worried. His new opus had something like 25 themes, most of them growing out of a previous one "like an amoeba splitting off." Said he: "The one weakness may be that it has too much music. There is no padding ... no trills or flourishes. It's all music."

But when Conductor Serge Koussevitzky got it under way, the audience found No. 2 not at all hard to like. It opened with a quiet conversation between two clarinets--"the loneliest music I know" --symbolizing Auden's characters in the Third Avenue bar. Nearly 30 minutes later, it got to a huge, orgiastic orchestral climax, then resolved into a thoughtful epilogue. Overall, listeners heard more melody and less dissonance than they had come prepared to hear. Standout movement: a rhythmically terrific apotheosis of jazz, with Lennie himself at the piano, backed by bass fiddler and percussion.

When it was over, college students stomped their feet. A few white-haired ladies sat grimly with their hands folded, although most gave Boston-favorite Bernstein a big warm hand. Most could agree with "Koussy" that No. 2 was "real American--extraordinaire !"

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