On 14 November 1937, the nineteen-year-old Leonard Bernstein found himself sitting in the front row of the balcony at the Guild Theater in New York next to someone he described as ‘an odd-looking man in his thirties’ with ‘a pair of glasses resting on his great hooked nose and a mouth filled with teeth’. When he was introduced to this neighbour and learnt that he was seated beside Aaron Copland, he was astonished as he had imagined that this composer he greatly admired would look like ‘a cross between Walt Whitman and an Old Testament prophet’. As it happened to be Copland’s birthday – his thirty-seventh – he invited Bernstein to join him and several of his friends at a party in his studio. Bernstein had recently learnt to play Copland’s Piano Variations and would play them often although, as he had to admit, his performances tended to empty the room. On this occasion, however, when Copland dared him to play the piece, nobody left.
According to Bernstein, Copland was the most sensational human being he had ever come across and later claimed that the closest he ever came to studying composition with anyone was by showing everything he wrote to the older man. A close friendship developed between them and they would often play piano reductions of Copland’s works together. As it turned out, the first time that Bernstein’s name was to appear in print on a musical score was in 1941 when his own piano transcription of Copland’s El Salón México was published.
Bernstein graduated from Harvard University in 1939, going on to study conducting with Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. In 1940 he enrolled at the Berkshire Music Center, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home at Tanglewood in northwestern Massachusetts, in order to continue his studies with its conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Copland was also on the teaching staff at Tanglewood, as was the distinguished German composer Paul Hindemith.
Following the 1941 Tanglewood Festival, Bernstein went for a holiday in Key West, Florida and there, influenced by the Cuban music he heard on Radio Havana, settled down to composition, one of the resulting pieces being a sonata for clarinet. Two years earlier, depressed and with no work, he had spent his last four dollars on a clarinet he had seen in a pawn shop. This, he claimed, comforted him for a while. He completed the Sonata the following year in Boston and its first performance was given there on 21 April 1942 at the Institute of Modern Art by the composer and the clarinettist, David Glazer, with whom he had shared a room at Tanglewood.
For that year’s festival, Bernstein had been appointed Koussevitzky’s assistant. In the orchestra was the twenty-two-year-old clarinettist David Oppenheim and, before long, Bernstein was telling Copland, now his mentor and confidant, of an idyllic hitchhiking holiday he and Oppenheim were enjoying in New England. On 21 February 1943, the two of them gave the first broadcast performance of the Clarinet Sonata and three weeks later, the first public perfomance in New York. Not surprisingly, Bernstein dedicated the piece to his new friend.
Later in 1943 – on 14 November, Aaron Copland’s forty-third birthday – Bernstein found himself conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at an afternoon concert in the Carnegie Hall. The conductor should have been Bruno Walter but he had been taken ill at the last moment and the orchestra’s chief conductor, Artur Rodzinski, was on leave. With no time for rehearsal – just a few words with Walter – Bernstein, by then Rodzinski’s assistant, had to take charge. On the programme were works by Schumann, Richard Strauss, Wagner and Miklós Rózsa. Although he had never before conducted Rózsa’s Theme, variations and finale, Bernstein’s performance of it ‘brought the house down’. Thus was born Bernstein’s international career as a conductor.
Miklós Rózsa was born in Budapest in April 1907 and started playing the violin at the age of five. In 1925 he moved to Leipzig to study both chemistry and music, but soon decided to concentrate on the latter. He was to live in Paris during the early 1930s before moving to London where fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda invited him to write the music for some of the films he was about to produce. This work later took him to Hollywood where he continued to write film scores, three of which – Ben-Hur, A Double Life and Spellbound – were to win him Academy Awards. As well as composing music for the cinema which was admired by Aaron Copland amongst many others, Rózsa taught composition at the University of Southern California at Santa Barbara from 1945 until 1965 and took American citizenship in 1946. He died in Los Angeles on 27 July 1995 at the age of eighty-eight.
Rózsa composed two works for solo clarinet – the Sonatina, Op.27 and the Sonata, Op.41. The later work was given its first performance by Gervase de Peyer in 1987 but there seems to be confusion over the origins of Op.27, with some sources giving 1951 as the date of composition and others 1957; indeed, in Christopher Palmer’s monograph about the composer, both dates are given, the first in the work list and the second in the text. In his autobiography – Double Life – Rózsa mentions the Sonatina only in passing but, in the list of his compositions it appears, along with a Suite for Orchestra from his latest film Quo Vadis, in the year 1951. There is no reference to a first performance but it seems that the first recording of it was made by Charles MacLeod who was Principal Clarinet with the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra. Rózsa dedicated the Sonatina to fellow film composer, Bronislau Kaper. Born in Warsaw in 1902, Kaper composed the music for many films notably Mutiny on the Bounty, a commission which had first been offered by MGM to Rózsa who was too busy at the time with the score of El Cid for another film company.
On 23 October 1943, a US Army aircraft, piloted by 1st Lieutenant Harry Hickenlooper Dunham, crashed on its way to New Guinea. Born in Cincinnati in 1910, Dunham was a film cinematographer in civilian life and a close friend of Aaron Copland. At that time, Copland was composing a Violin Sonata which he subsequently dedicated to Dunham’s memory. The Sonata was given its first performance on 17 January 1944 at New York’s Town Hall by the composer and the violinist Ruth Posselt, wife of Richard Burgin who was another member of the Tanglewood teaching staff.
It was in 1978, at the suggestion of Timothy Paradise, who was then Principal Clarinet with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, that Copland transcribed his Violin Sonata for clarinet and piano, transposing it down a major third to make good use of the clarinet’s lower register. He was assisted in this task by Michael Webster who was to give this version its first performance with the pianist Barry Snyder on 10 March 1986 at the Merkin Concert Hall in New York City.
Copland began to compose his Clarinet Concerto in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro during a goodwill tour of South America arranged by the US State Department. It had been commissioned the previous year by the American jazz clarinettist and ‘King of Swing’, Benny Goodman (1909-1986) who was also a fine performer in the concert hall. Some ten years earlier, Goodman had commissioned Béla Bartók to compose a work for him – Contrasts for clarinet, violin and piano – and he was later to give the first performances of works by several other composers including Francis Poulenc (his Clarinet Sonata with Leonard Bernstein as pianist) and Bernstein’s own Prelude, Fugue and Riffs.
Copland continued work on his Clarinet Concerto at Tanglewood in the summer of 1948, completing it at his home in Sneden’s Landing that October. Goodman, as he later told an interviewer, had ‘made no demands on what Copland should write’ but at their first read-through of the completed work – in the presence of David Oppenheim – Goodman did ask for a few changes to be made.
The Concerto was heard for the first time on 6 November 1950 during an NBC radio broadcast with Goodman as soloist, the NBC Symphony Orchestra being conducted by Fritz Reiner. The first public concert performance took place at New York’s Carnegie Hall on 28 November when the Philadelphia Orchestra was conducted by Eugene Ormandy and Ralph McLane, the Orchestra’s Principal Clarinet, was the soloist. Goodman and Copland were to record the work twice, first in 1950 and then in 1963. (There had been talk of Bernstein and Oppenheim recording the Concerto at about that time but in the event Bernstein did not record it until 1989 and then with Stanley Drucker.)
In 1951, the Concerto was used for The Pied Piper, a ballet choreographed by Jerome Robbins (who was later to work with Bernstein on West Side Story), the piper being the clarinet and not the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the subject of Robert Browning’s famous poem.

© 2020 Peter Avis