At the New Yorker website, a Cultural Comment about Bradley Cooper's remarkably sensitive, true-t0-life film about Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre — for me, the most satisfying classical-music film in many decades. Much thanks to Daniel Zalewski, for editing the piece, and to Han Zhang, for fact-checking it. This is my first online article in twelve years that hasn't been edited by Michael Agger. I'd like to express lasting gratitude for all the work he did on my behalf.
In the course of researching my piece, I realized that the Curtis Institute archive has digitized and placed online dozens of hours of interviews that John Gruen undertook for his 1968 book The Private World of Leonard Bernstein. I had initially thought that Cooper and his co-writer Josh Singer had taken some lines from Gruen's book and added plausible-sounding dialogue of their own. On listening to the Curtis tapes, however, I realized that they had worked directly from the originals. I wondered whether they had also found a recording of the famous "coming out" speech that Bernstein delivered before the Shostakovich Fourteenth in 1976, but I don't know if this was the case. The film is so thoroughly researched that it almost qualifies as a work of scholarship in itself. It's a very singular achievement.
Here's one delightful item from the Gruen archive: Jamie and Alexander Bernstein discuss whether their father is sensitive to criticism, either public or private.
