Lennie's Brainchildren

At 33, Leonard Bernstein is the most versatile professional music maker in the U.S.; wrapped up in his ingratiating person are a conductor, pianist, composer, librettist, lecturer and festivalist. A year ago it crossed his mind, not for the first time, that he was too versatile for his own good; he announced that he would retire from public life to catch up on his composing. Last week, at Brandeis University's first Festival of the Creative Arts in Waltham, Mass., Lennie Bernstein husked the fruit of his year's work, a "little opera" called Trouble in Tahiti.

The 35-minute composition began with a spine-tingling run on the clarinet, launched into a satire of suburban domestic strife with a jazzy Greek chorus, pantomime action and modern musical effects. Lennie's libretto, in which his unhappily married couple climaxed a day of frustration by going to an escapist movie, was a little too real to be funny. One listener summed it up: "It didn't take Bernstein to show that they were mismated."

Breakneck Speed. As composer, Bernstein made an imaginative stab at welding popular music into artistic form, succeeded in producing some moments of brilliance. The jazzy tone was appealing, but the effect was so disjointed that the opera seemed like a study for another Broadway success like Lennie's own On the Town (TIME, Jan. 8, 1945). New York Times Critic Howard Taubman suspected that Trouble In Tahiti, was written at "breakneck speed," came away with the impression that it "could and should have been much better." A larger audience will have a chance to judge for itself: NBC will produce it on TV next season.

Out of the year he had allotted himself, Lennie was able to devote only about two months to composition. He left his composing hideaway in Mexico to rush to Conductor Serge Koussevitzky's deathbed last summer, then agreed to conduct at Tanglewood and teach in Koussevitzky's place at the Berkshire Music Center. Lennie also substituted for Charles Munch as conductor of the Boston Symphony when Munch fell ill last winter. And he accepted a new double assignment: professor of music and director of the school of creative arts at Brandeis.

Four-Day Whirl. In Brandeis' canvas-topped amphitheater, he whirled through four days & nights of conducting (his own opera. Marc Blitzstein's new English adaptation of Kurt Weill's Three-Penny Opera, a dance work and a symphony concert) and leading discussions on theater, films, jazz and the relation of music to society ("Do we really need or want" the concert hall in the U.S.?).

When it was all over, Lennie Bernstein had scored a personal success, but his own problem remained to be solved: he was as determined as ever to take a year off for composing, but he cannot start until he finishes out the summer at Tanglewood. "Sometimes," he said, reflecting on his multiple career, "I wonder who I am."

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