Recollections, A Lifetime with Bernstein

As Bradley Cooper's Bernstein film Maestro lands on Netflix, our Finance Assistant Sue Nicholls takes time away from the books to reflect on some of the many occasions when the composer's music has inspired and moved her over the course of her life as a performer and audience-member...

'Friday afternoon in the Music Room at Queen Mary’s High School, Walsall. Mr Lister taps his music stand, warmed brass and woodwind instruments are raised to pursed lips, embouchures ready, the baton comes down; feet start tapping to keep time and one of our regular pieces, Bernstein’s Overture to Candide, blasts out of the open windows to passers-by below. Years later at college (and unable to get a ticket to see Lenny himself conduct at the Barbican in what was to be his final appearance in the UK), I buy myself a copy of the recording of the concert on CD, hearing the themes in the overture (the French horn part of which remains indelibly burned into my musical memory-bank) throughout the opera for the first time.

I’d been introduced to Bernstein’s music one Saturday afternoon whilst at Junior School, when I’d sat and watched West Side Story with my Dad. I remember Mum calling through from the kitchen to ask what was happening in the film and Dad replied 'They’re getting cool!' after the cast had been singing and dancing to ‘Cool’ for what seemed like the last ten minutes and I laughed my head off. It had such an impact on me that the following week when we had to suggest two names for a classroom quiz, I was adamant that the names had to be Sharks and Jets.

Next up was performing Chichester Psalms at college, but then years later (2003 to be exact) I was reacquainted not with just the Overture to Candide, but with the whole glorious musical - finding myself in the best production ever master-minded by the genius that was Graham Vick, with Birmingham Opera Company. We laughed uproariously in the Overture, danced flamenco and sang in Spanish through ‘I am easily assimilated’, larked about backstage to the vocal pyrotechnics of ‘Glitter and be gay’ - and with Yours Truly swinging above the audiences’ heads wearing a pink feather headdress in 'Paris', it truly was the best of all possible worlds and the best eight weeks of my life.

With the writing of West Side Story overlapping with that of Candide, there’s something about the variety of writing - the syncopation, the orchestration, the melodies, the harmonies, the intervals, the tonality, the Americanness with all its musical influences from jazz to classical to Latin American - that is so characteristic of Bernstein’s compositions.

I always think both works are absolutely perfect; you couldn’t change a single note to improve either one of them. Candide, with his innocence and naivety that everything is done for the best, captured the personal notion that even when he thinks his love, Cunegonde, has gone for good, there is still something good that will happen and is yet to happen. And the connecting themes that I know so well from the overture generate musical links that take the audience from land to land and through the characters' emotional journey.

But since 2021, that glorious finale ‘Make our garden grow’ produces a different emotion and sense of loss. In the August of that year, mid-rehearsal for another of my passions (Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Das Rheingold to be exact) news began to arrive that Graham wasn’t well - we all expected him to recover and to see him at the next rehearsal. But he never did, and we never got to share his extraordinary presence again. News began to break on social media and the national news that he had died. The next day at rehearsal we hugged and sobbed and, after closing night, rehearsals began on the pieces to be sung at his funeral.

The final one was ‘Make our garden grow’ - which we summoned up the energy to sing, more brilliant and with more meaning and emotion, perpetually blurry eyed, one last time. Candide, forever flying high, vocally, metaphorically and physically, in the best of all possible worlds.'