It was June 17, 1983, and Houston Grand Opera had just given the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s opera A Quiet Place. Downtown Houston’s Four Seasons ballroom was packed with donors and dignitaries in black tie, assembled for an elegant post-show dinner. Presiding over the affair was then-General Director David Gockley, who labored tirelessly to bring this new work to the stage.
But, of course, the man of the hour was the 64-year-old Bernstein—white-haired and paunchy, but well-tanned and still youthful. Soprano Sheri Greenawald, who debuted the role of Dede in A Quiet Place, recalls how events unfolded.
“Even though champagne was running freely that night, Lenny had a bottle of scotch on his table. He was in a very jolly mood. When it came time to address the room, he stood up and said, ‘I think we have to thank David Gockley for bringing culture to this cow town!’
“My jaw dropped. There was silence. I could see David was turning six shades of white.” Greenawald and her Quiet Place co-star, the late baritone Timothy Nolen, “kicked each other black and blue under the table. Because Cowtown is Fort Worth. To call Houston a cow town—it’s an oil town, if it’s anything!”
Although Bernstein’s opening-night joke “went over like a lead balloon,” as Greenawald puts it, his intent was mischievous rather than malicious. “I think Lenny could get away with most anything,” she adds. “He was sort of the king of the world, really. Anybody who worked with him surely knew his power. You just absorbed it.”
The composer was genuinely grateful to Gockley and the company for mounting A Quiet Place. Indeed, a lot was riding on this new work. Bernstein had always had a fraught relationship with music theater in all its forms, never feeling like he could get any genre quite right—especially opera.
Having grown up in the shadow of George Gershwin, Bernstein had a life-long dream of writing the next Great American Opera, one that could rank alongside Porgy and Bess. In 1976, Bernstein attended HGO’s legendary production of Porgy during its run on Broadway.
“He came backstage afterward,” says former HGO Music Director John DeMain, who conducted the performance. “And he said, ‘I’ve waited 40 years to hear it done this way.’ He had never conducted that score, but he knew every note of it. Lenny idolized Gershwin. I think he saw himself as a modern-day Gershwin, as the successor to Gershwin.”
In many ways, West Side Story carried forward Gershwin’s legacy, more so than the works that Bernstein explicitly labeled “opera.” The score for his 1957 musical is structured operatically, unified by a system of recurring themes—like the rising, three-note motive from the prologue. You can hear it being whistled during the aerial shot of Manhattan at the beginning of the 1961 film adaptation.
DeMain remembers learning some surprising information about this little tune, and other supposedly instrumental motives from the musical. After being chosen to conduct the Broadway revival of West Side Story in 1980, he was granted an hourlong audience with Bernstein at the maestro’s Central Park West apartment.
“Around 55 minutes in, he said, ‘Go to the piano and play the opening notes of the prologue.’ So, ba-dee-da. And he said to me, ‘You know, all of that had words. Stephen Sondheim and I wrote words to the whole prologue, the whole dance at the gym, everything.’”
The show’s choreographer and director, Jerome Robbins, eliminated many of these lyrics, converting sung portions into purely danced sequences. “It was Robbins who fashioned the show into the hit that it was,” admits DeMain.
Previews for that 1980 production took place in Miami, where Bernstein was on hand to oversee the musical direction. Initially, he tried to impose his ideal tempos on DeMain. But they were far too fast or slow for Robbins’s choreography. The composer eventually gave up, realizing that West Side Story was born of collaboration, not a single mastermind. As DeMain recounts, “Lenny said to me, ‘We agreed to do this revival because Jerry Robbins would stage and choreograph it. Give him what he wants.’”
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Bernstein’s first opera, Trouble in Tahiti, premiered in 1952. It’s a one-act send-up of mid-century suburbia in which a trio of scat singers narrate the unhappy realities of a picket-fence marriage. This was followed by his 1956 operetta Candide, based on Voltaire’s satirical novella. While a hit, the work underwent endless revisions throughout the composer’s life.
In 1971, Bernstein returned to the stage with his Mass, an innovative yet underappreciated work that combined elements of a Catholic service and a musical revue. Five years later, he tried to replicate the popularity of West Side Story with another musical, the presidential-themed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It turned out to be one of the most famous flops in Broadway history, closing after only seven performances.
By 1980, then, Bernstein was in desperate need of a success to lift him out of his theatrical slump. It was at that point when he received a letter from a journalist requesting an interview. Appended to the note was an odd postscript: “Interested in librettos?” The writer was Stephen Wadsworth, who would become a respected director of opera and classical drama (he staged HGO’s new production of Il trovatore this season). At the time, however, he was an unknown twenty-something.
Wadsworth and Bernstein clicked, and the two became fast friends. “Once he trusted you and allowed you access,” says Wadsworth, “he was unreserved in his respect and affection, and the dearest and most humble collaborator.” Together, they conceived a sequel to Trouble in Tahiti that examined the lives of its characters 30 years later. Titled A Quiet Place, the opera was an intense study of family dysfunction and mental illness. Wadsworth’s libretto drew on his own first-hand experiences, combined with autobiographical elements from Bernstein.
“There were certain relationships he wanted to write about,” explains Wadsworth, “and of course he opened the weighty, creaking door of his heart, and all that life experience, energy, and invention burst out like a million dollar bills being blown down the street. My job was to make him want to open his heart, then try to catch as many bills as I could and get them into, you know, the attaché case. To calm that wind and get the bills into some kind of order.”
At his appointment as general director of HGO in 1972, David Gockley made it the company’s mission to cultivate new American works. A Quiet Place was commissioned as the fifth HGO world premiere, to be presented in 1983 as a double bill with Trouble in Tahiti. DeMain, remembering Bernstein’s tendency to interfere during West Side Story preparations, had the composer fly out to Houston after rehearsals were already underway.
Once he arrived, the cast performed the first scene for Bernstein at a warehouse space in Chinatown. “And he’s watching it,” recalls DeMain, “and he’s weeping! ‘It’s all so’—I won’t use his language—‘fabulous, effing fabulous!’ He was very moved and thrilled with the whole thing.”
That particular scene, which depicts the funeral of a departed wife, no doubt held great personal significance for Bernstein. Five years earlier, he had lost his own spouse, Felicia Montealegre. Their rocky relationship and Bernstein’s complex sexual identity also seem to be reflected in Wadsworth’s libretto, which features a bisexual character married to a woman.
Closeted for most of his life, Bernstein began to display his same-sex attraction more openly in the years following his wife’s death. Sheri Greenawald retells how she and the rest of the cast invited him out dancing one night to a gay country-western joint, the Brazos River Bottom. “Now we know why he writes in 5/4 time,” remarked Greenawald’s colleague, “he dances in 5/4!”
Bernstein could really let loose. Following a Sunday matinee of A Quiet Place, the composer hosted a poolside party at the Four Seasons. Local jazz musician Robert “Doc” Morgan was there leading his band in some tasteful background music while the guests awaited the maestro’s arrival.
“Everybody started getting kind of restless,” Morgan recollects. “Finally—and I’m not exaggerating—you could hear this roar getting louder and louder. All of a sudden, the doors flung open, and out walked Leonard Bernstein in a bathing suit, cowboy hat, a cigarette held high, with 20 gay young men hopping around him. The party changed like that.”
8mm footage from that shindig shows a bath-robed Bernstein basking in his post-show glory. Playing the Texan boy from “cow town” in his Roy Rogers hat, he dances a little striptease, executes a Chaplinesque heel kick, and embraces members of the featured entertainment—the all-gay Montrose Country Cloggers.
At the climax of the night, Bernstein asked Morgan if he could sing one of his own numbers, “Some Other Time” from On the Town. “I said, ‘Lenny, if the key’s not right, tell me.’ He looked at me like I was from Mars and said, ‘Mr. Morgan [pretends to puff on cigarette] when I sing [puff] there is no key.’ And listen, it was terrible—it was embarrassing! He messed up the form on his own tune.” A snapshot captures Morgan looking on in confusion as Bernstein skips to the bridge prematurely.
“Being with Lenny was always a little dangerous, you know?,” sums up Greenawald. “You’re not dealing with your choir director down the street. This is Leonard f***king Bernstein, okay?”
Of course, behind Bernstein’s showboating and carousing—as well as the persona of the Great American Composer-cum-Conductor—was a genuine and vulnerable man that Wadsworth recalls fondly.
“I figured out early on that, one-on-one, away from the scramble of fame and crowded rooms, he was truly one of the great people. With others around, expecting him always to perform Leonard Bernstein for them, he was uncomfortable and often irascible. When we could simply talk and work, he was of course one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever known—an intellectual companion nonpareil, a very funny man, an important humanitarian thinker, a mentor, and a friend.”