The high point of this choreographed political concert shows Leonard Bernstein paying homage to Dmitri Shostakovich. More interesting is his close greenroom engagement with the poet and Doctor Zhivago novelist Boris Pasternak.
Watch to the end.
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Knowing what we now do about DSch, this must have been painful for him. What if Lenny had done something to subtly, or otherwise, break through the official persona of the composer – even by performing the far stronger wartime 8th symphony, or the 5th, also a far stronger, and more ambiguous work?
Pasternak was notn only a great poet and writer, but also a link to 19th century art and culture. He looks so animated. Hard to believe he died a year later. Very moving. Thank you for posting
Those were the times when there was diplomacy, and even cultural diplomacy, in spite of enmity and scares — of which there were as much back then as there are today (“evil commies want to destroy all of the world’s free societies” and all that).
When people still had clear grasp of what a world war feels like.
When producers of weapons and their stockholders had not as much influence on public opinion and official policy as they have today.
There have always been silver linings. Three years later there was the Cuban missile crisis.
The Cuban missile crisis is actually a great example to prove my point: it was solved by diplomacy within 13 days, without a single shot fired and without a single soldier dead, in spite of Kennedy having been (according to Wikipedia) “advised [by the National Security Council] to carry out an air strike on Cuban soil (…), followed by an invasion of the Cuban mainland.”
Even the solution itself had diplomacy in it (source again WP): “Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba (…) in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement not to invade Cuba again. Secretly, the United States agreed to dismantle all of the offensive weapons it had deployed [one year earlier] to Turkey.” An outcome that had a tad of defeat for both sides, but both sides agreed that this was better than war.
(The whole WP article is worth a read, especially since most people — I used to be one of them myself — have never heard of the deployment of US nuclear missiles to Italy and Turkey being part of the “Cuban” crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis .)