Portrait of The Artist, with Smudges

By Michael Walsh

In 1943, at the age of 25, Leonard Bernstein made a spectacular debut with the New York Philharmonic, substituting at the last minute for ailing Conductor Bruno Walter. Bernstein found himself on the front pages the next day, and ever since he has been one of the most prominent figures on the American musical scene. Familiar to millions from his lectures and performances on television, renowned as the composer of West Side Story, hailed as a formidable interpreter of Beethoven and Mahler, Bernstein may be the most protean talent and the most celebrated conductor America has yet produced.

Now he may be the most controversial as well. Joan Peyser's Bernstein: A Biography (Morrow; $22.95), published this week, has been causing ripples of rumor and anticipation in the music world for months. A wide-ranging examination of the composer-conductor's life, works and milieu, it tackles such touchy subjects as Bernstein's Jewishness, his support for left-wing causes and, in what is surely the book's most provocative allegation, his bisexuality.

Peyser, former editor of the Musical Quarterly and author of an earlier warts-and-all biography of Composer-Conductor Pierre Boulez, professes to admire the manifest gifts of Bernstein the musician, but clearly she finds Bernstein the man repugnant. How else to account for incident after unpalatable incident that depicts him in the most unflattering light? Here he is, sharing a panel in Minneapolis and expounding publicly on a well-known colleague's adult circumcision. Here he is at a party at Indiana University in 1982, obscenely serenading the dean of the music school.

And despite his 1951 marriage to Actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn (whom he temporarily abandoned for a male lover two years before her death in 1978) and their three children, here is his involvement in classical music's homosexual subculture. Bernstein's predilections have never been secret in the | gossipy music world. But those who were surprised at the disclosure that Rock Hudson was gay will no doubt be shocked by Peyser's identification of Bernstein, Composer Aaron Copland, the late Conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos and others as homosexuals.

What, however, has this to do with art? The sprawling, sometimes rambling narrative indulges in an uncomfortable amount of kitchen psychoanalysis ("The only thing that can explain this man, with his chain smoking, pills, liquor, insomnia, and need for crowds, is incredible pain") in arguing that Bernstein's background has forged the schizoid musician, from slick tunesmith to leonine conductor, that he has become. In Peyser's view -- formed with the partial cooperation of Bernstein, who gave her permission to use some personal letters -- the works of the artist cannot be understood without taking into account the character of the man.

Perhaps. But eccentricity often accompanies creativity, even genius. Brahms frequented prostitutes. Liszt cut a Byronic swath through the women of 19th century Europe. All three of Wagner's children by Liszt's illegitimate daughter Cosima were conceived while she was still married to her first husband. Mussorgsky was a dipsomaniac and Tchaikovsky a homosexual. All these composers were able to transcend their personal difficulties to create great art; those searching for moral paradigms had better look elsewhere.

The real problem with Bernstein lies not in the shambles of his private life but in the deterioration of his creative side. On the podium, with his exaggerated gestures and lugubrious tempos, he has become a parody of himself. As a composer, he has squandered the brilliant promise of West Side Story and the ballet Fancy Free on the embarrassing bathos of the 1971 theater piece Mass and his 1983 opera A Quiet Place. The unsavory life of the man chronicled in Peyser's portrait of the artist is almost irrelevant to the greater tragedy of the composer. Wealthy, acclaimed, esteemed, he and his reputation will survive this biography. Still, Bernstein is likely to go into the history books with an asterisk after his name, one that signifies: What if . . .?