One hundred years from the day of his birth, Leonard Bernstein remains for many music lovers a marmite musician. Reactions to his work as composer, conductor and pianist remain both strong and strongly divided. No part of his legacy remains more controversial than his role as an interpreter of and advocate for the music of Gustav Mahler. I was sharply reminded of this fact recently when a birthday salute to Bernstein among colleagues this week quickly caught fire and became a “spirited debate.”

For some, Bernstein is the man who gave us Mahler, the conductor whose temperament and soul are closest to Mahler, the recording artist whose performances still remain close to definitive. He was the champion and cheerleader who brought Mahler to a worldwide audience.

For others, Bernstein the Mahler conductor is virtually shorthand for self-indulgence and bad taste. To many, his legacy is hugely overhyped and takes away from the crucial contributions of other conductors.

Here are some 100th birthday thoughts about Bernstein and Mahler.

Did Bernstein “bring Mahler’s music to the world?”

Crediting Bernstein with, or blaming him for, the ubiquity of Mahler’s music today seems wildly over-simplistic. Mahler’s music was actually performed with some regularity before World War II. Banned in Germany by the Nazi’s after 1933 and later across Austria, it had become much more of a rarity by the time the war ended.

Even as Bernstein was staking out his territory as a Mahler conductor with the New York Philharmonic (where Mahler himself had been Music Director at the end of his life), maestri of a generation or two older than him were making important recordings and contributing to the rediscovery of Mahler’s music. During Bernstein’s early career, two of Mahler’s former assistant conductors (Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter) were still actively performing and recording his music. Dmitri Mitropoulos, Bernstein’s former mentor and predecessor at the NY Philharmonic. In the UK, Sir John Barbirolli, another one-time Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, established himself as a great Mahlerian at the Hallé. Jascha Horenstein, 20 years Bernstein’s senior, generated a robust Mahler discography between 1950 and 1972.

Although Bernstein was probably at the front of the class in his own generation in terms of conducting and recording almost the full gamut of Mahler’s orchestral output, his near contemporaries Sir George Solti and Herbert von Karajan also built up hugely successful Mahler discographies.

Based on all of this, crediting Bernstein with somehow leading the charge for Mahler is not really credible. Many other conductors, producers and broadcasters did their part, and the long playing record was an essential tool in expanding the audience for his music.On the other hand, Bernstein was the most famous, most successful, most prolific, most influential and most discussed Mahler interpreter who has ever lived. Of course he didn’t rediscover Mahler or rescue Mahler’s music from oblivion, but one would be hard pressed to think of any other conductor who did as much or more to facilitate the dissemination and understanding of Mahler’s music.

What is Bernstein’s lasting legacy as a Mahler interpreter?

The cornerstone of Bernstein’s enduring legacy as an interpreter of Mahler are his three recorded cycles of Mahler’s music – the cycle of symphonies made for Columbia (now Sony) during his tenure at the New York Philharmonic in the 1960’s, the cycle of filmed performances made for Unitel in the 1970’s with the Vienna Philharmonic and London Symphony, and the late Deutsche Grammophon cycle which used the New York Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic and Concertgebouw Orchestras in the 1980’s. There is also the famous live recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic (my favourite) and a number of one off live recordings and special projects. He recorded most of Mahler’s song cycles and forges strong ties with several singers, notably Christa Ludwig, Thomas Hampson, James King and Janet Baker. Sadly, Bernstein never recorded the Cooke Performing Version of the complete Mahler 10th Symphony and I’m not aware of him ever doing Das Klagende Lied.

The Early Cycle

Bernstein’s Columbia cycle was probably the most influential of his recorded traversals of Mahler’s music. For many critics, these early performances are fresher and less affected than his later performances, which often come in for criticism as being mannered and self-indulgent. From my perspective, the variable quality of orchestral playing in this cycle seriously limits its interest to modern listener. The NYPO of this time was not a particularly polished or cohesive ensemble, and in the less familiar symphonies there is an all-to-obvious lack of detail and refinement. The best performances seem to be of those works the Philharmonic would have had in their blood already. The combination of Bernstein’s energy and pacing with more secure intonation and ensemble was often formidable. His early recording of Mahler 1 was one of the first recordings I ever bought and I still think it’s pretty darn good. Listen to the second movement and note that Bernstein is one of the few conductors to really take note of Mahler’s admonition of “nicht zu schnell” (“not too fast”) at the beginning, and his reading of the trio oozes nuance and sophisticated rubato.

The 1970’s Filmed Cycle

Although Mahler served as conductor of both the New York and Vienna philharmonics, the VPO of the 1970’s was a far more sophisticated orchestra than their American rivals, and Bernstein’s series of filmed performances (directed by Humphrey Burton) hold up well as one of the most important contributions to the recording history of Mahler’s music. The rehearsal footage gathered during the recordings shows that Mahler’s music was by no means in the blood or fingers of the musicians of this era.

Particularly painful to watch is Bernstein having to coach the elderly principal trumpeter of the VPO in the opening solo of Mahler 5 – something that every young trumpet player is now expected to know backwards. And the 1970’s-era VPO could be maddeningly un-even. The performance of Mahler 7 is perhaps one of the most technically inconsistent commercial recordings of anything ever made. The first movement often sounds like a sight-reading session by a community orchestra, but the very difficult Rondo Finale is breathtakingly good. In the Second Symphony Janet Baker (singing with the London Symphony, rather than the VPO) will simply never be bettered. And Christa Ludwig and René Kollo are very, very good in Das Lied von der Erde with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s disappointing the IPO is nowhere nearly as strong as either the LSO or VPO and the acoustic of their hall contrives to bring out every tiny slip.

The 1980’s DG Cycle

Chances are that if you don’t like Bernstein, you really don’t like these late recordings. On the other hand, if you like Lenny, you luv these recordings.  The slows are slower, the affectations are bigger, the indulgences are….. more indulgent. On the other hand, other than some shocking trumpet playing from the Concertgebouw in places, technical standards across the three orchestras are incredibly high, and the best of the performances are seriously epic. I also prefer the modern sound. I don’t think I’ve ever heard orchestra musicians speak with such reverence for an occasion as I have several members of the NYPO speaking about this performance of Mahler 2. When late Bernstein reached for the stars, it really could be cosmic.

The usual criticisms and some balance

So, was Bernstein the Mahler conductor all hat and no cattle? Too much showbiz and not enough biz? Bernstein’s podium manner always divided opinion and always will. One thing 20 + years as a professional conductor has taught me is that we don’t get to choose how we look when we conduct. If we’re open and true to the music, it moves us (the conductors) as it must. Bernstein by all accounts had as much ego and razzle dazzle as the next guy, but most of what you see on the podium in those films I think came from an honest place. It’s not often in performance that you have the mental space to do something just to look cool. If you find him distracting to watch, close your eyes.

The fact is, Bernstein had an astounding technique. Nobody before or since could get an orchestra to turn on a dime the way he could. Yes, many things on the recordings are out of tune, the sound can be harsh and is rarely memorably cultured or refined (unless he was reaching for a special colour, something he was a master of), but his tempo changes are remarkably precise and some of the rubato is really incredible.

In fact, I think that one thing I hear Bernstein criticized for most often is the very thing I think he excels at, and that is flexibility of tempo. I’ve heard him criticised countless times in Mahler for “pulling the tempo around” as proof of his self-indulgent temperament and lack of respect for the score. In fact, Bernstein is one of very few conductors with the technique and guts to really try to do most of Mahler’s many (and often very challenging) tempo changes. Plenty of very eminent Mahler conductors (Abbado, Haitink and Boulez all come to mind) tend to shy away from many of Mahler’s accelerandi and shifts of tempo. Playing whole movements, or even sections, of Mahler symphonies in a single tempo may be popular, but it’s not being faithful to the composer’s scores or to what we know of Mahler’s own performances as documented on piano rolls.

Bernstein’s interpretation of the Adagietto from Mahler 5 is often cited as a great example of Lenny getting it badly wrong. Bernstein did have a particularly funereal view of the movement which must by viewed with some scepticism knowing what we now know about the Adagietto’s gestation as a gesture of love to Alma. However, I’ve written before about how love and death so often sit side-by-side in Mahler’s music. Bernstein’s reading is probably a bit too static in places where it shouldn’t be (although Mahler himself famously couldn’t’ make up his mind whether the end of the Adagietto should speed up or slow down), but I’m not sure the current vogue for rather trite dashes through the movement are being any more faithful to the composer who, after all, wrote Sehr langsam (very slowly) and then “molto Adagio” over the opening bars.

Whatever doubts one might have about Bernstein’s Adagietto, his late performances of the Scherzo from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony are among the most technically and musically impressive bits of Mahler on recording. It seems that 30 years after his last recordings with the VPO, nobody has yet come close (to the best of my knowledge) to handling the many tempi in this movement with the degree of accuracy and style that Bernstein did. “The Scherzo is a damnable movement,” said Mahler. “It will have a long history of suffering! Conductors will take it too fast for fifty years, and audiences—Oh heavens—what sort of faces will they pull at this chaos…..” It seems to me that Bernstein was the first to make sense of this comment in a reading that is properly “nicht zu schnell” (“not too fast”!) and true to almost every tempo indication in the score.

The final word

At the end of the day, a conductor’s failings don’t really matter. What he or she gets wrong, someone else will get right, and the bigger the miscalculation from someone like Bernstein, the more discussion and research it triggers. Conductors continue to learn from his mistakes, but as someone who conducts this repertoire often, as the years go on, I find myself more and more impressed and humbled by what he got right, often working with orchestras that were pretty unfamiliar with the music. Bernstein’s legacy as a populariser of Mahler seems beside the point anyway – if he hadn’t done his part to introduce Mahler to the masses, someone else would have. His real importance is where he set the bar in his best performances.