Let the artists speak for themselves

Peter Hinton introduces the 06-07 Season

Peter Hinton on The Unanswered Question

Martin Julien, playwright on The Unanswered Question

World Premiere

Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question, composed in 1906, was the first 20th Century musical work to use spatial separation as a major element of the composition. The score specifies that three groups of instruments be placed around the concert hall, or even off-stage. One, a solo trumpet, keeps asking the eternal question; the second, increasingly irate and jabbering winds, tries to respond; and the third, a soothing background of soft strings, represents the constant harmony of the universe. Martin Julien’s The Unanswered Question draws on Leonard Bernstein’s celebrated Harvard Lectures of the same name, to examine the complicated triangle of a famous American conductor/composer, his wife, an actress, and the younger man who comes between them. Set on the evening of the actress’s return to Broadway, which conductor refuses to attend. That night proves pivotal to all three regarding the sacrifices made to music and the emotional costs of examining the contradictions.

"Perhaps Schoenberg and his followers have been misguided in their attempts to forge a new language through the destruction of tonality. Perhaps their deliberate courting of tension and confusion through the re-arrangement of tone, which seemed so important in this 20th century, misses the mark entirely. Maybe -- just maybe -- their dismissal of the ear as the ultimate human instrument through which we validate a piece of music is, in the end, an essentially impotent gesture. In the end, it may be that it isn’t the ear through which music truly communicates itself – but the heart." Martin Julien

In 1951, Leonard Bernstein married Felicia Montealegre, a pianist and actress. The two had met each other in 1946 at a musical performance by Montealegre’s piano teacher Claudio Arrau. During their long courtship they regularly attended each other’s performances: they were a "golden couple" and everybody thought their marriage would last forever. However, by the 1970s Felicia could no longer ignore evidence that Leonard had several young, male lovers. She started to have thoughts that her husband was going out with somebody else. Then Leonard met a man, Tom Cothran, at a party in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Cothran was a music director for KKHI, a local classical radio station. As soon as they saw each other they fell instantly in love. Before dinner at the party, Cothran and Bernstein talked about philosophy over cocktails. As the party came to an end they were still together. Bernstein said that his love for Cothran restored his happiness. After 25 years of marriage, Felicia and Leonard were separated. Yet when Felicia died on June 16, 1978 Leonard Bernstein believed himself responsible for his wife's death and his sense of guilt never left him.

"The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another..." Leonard Bernstein

Martin Julien
Photo: Laird Mackintosh
Illustration: Lino