>> Nicholas Alexander Brown: Hi, everyone, good morning. Welcome. This is the fun, less formal session to kick the day off here. Thank you, Solomon [ph], for the intro, and thank you to my wonderful and beloved colleagues from the music division for hosting me back today, even though I have moved on to a different part of my life working at WPA. But one of the great things about the arts community here in Washington is that we all work together all the time, no matter where you are housed institutionally. So the talk this morning is called Bernstein and American Social Identity, and it brings together various different strands of my own research and interest into Bernstein's life and career and music. Over the course of my graduate studies in musicology and undergraduate studies, and then also my professional musicology work that I did here at the library. I've spent a lot of time looking at Bernstein's thinking around American social issues such as racism, gender, public, private identity, sexuality, and politics, and then also looking at his relationship with specific political entities and moments. So, for example, his relationship with the Kennedy family, which is one of the most robust and profound relationships between an artist and a Presidential-level politician and their family in this country's history, I think. And so we're going to get into a bunch of those topics, and we're also going to frame the discussion based on two major works of his that perhaps you do not know so much about, or certainly are not as widely produced outside of the centennial year. And those two works are Songfest, which was a song cycle he was commissioned to write for the bicentennial of the United States, and it was commissioned by The Kennedy Center, and then also Trouble in Tahiti, which was written between 1951 and 1952 in its original form and was one of his complicated early works, even though he was experiencing lots of success at that stage with other works such as On the Town. Throughout the talk. I invite you to please share your thoughts and, you know, tidbits on social media if you're into that. So I will not chastise you for looking at your phone. Just don't answer a phone call. That's the only ground rule, and feel free to include the hashtag Bernstein@100 and tag the Library of Congress @LibraryCongress. This first photo here is a picture of Bernstein rehearsing the pit orchestra for Trouble in Tahiti in 1952 at Brandeis in Boston. So kind of to give you a sense, if this is your first declassified talk, the point of these interactions is to get you an opportunity to dive into certain collection items and actually go up to them and interact with them as you would in a research capacity. I'll give you some context around the ideas and the specific items, and then we'll meet at the table in the back room there for about 15 minutes, and you'll be able to walk around and see different highlights and ask questions and such. So this is kind of the framework. We're going to discuss the big idea. That, I think, is what -- what's the result of Bernstein's thinking of American social identity. We're going to set that up with the discussion of Bernstein's identity. We'll contextualize his identity thinking based on his musical output and the different works. We'll dive into his politics, and then we will do that close reading of two specific works and kind of contextualize the ideas further. Thank you, Jay [ph]. [ Laughter ] And then we'll conclude with a call to action that Bernstein posits throughout his career and actually wrote down in 1952, which is pretty special, and I picked this photo because it is licensed for non-commercial reuse, and I like his slippers [laughter]. I think it's very, you know, Bernstein trying to show his stature. Yet he's at home with his music stand in his slippers or in his apartment. And if you'd note on the piano, there is a portrait of Serge Koussevitzky, who was his conducting teacher and mentor, and founder of the Tanglewood Music Festival, as it is now known. So here's Lenny, we'll do his background first. Well, let me give you the context first. So big idea. Going back to this. Engaged musical citizenship. Bernstein was very intentional with his thinking. He went to Harvard. He went to Boston Latin. He went to Curtis. He was a very, very intelligent human being. His grades did not always reflect that. If you were to go look at his Harvard transcripts downstairs, you'll see some Cs and Bs, including in some music courses, which is really funny, I think. But Bernstein kind of approached his work and his life as a humanist. So he wanted everything that he did to have some kind of function and deliverable in terms of starting a conversation or drawing attention to an issue. And once he hit his fame, starting from his -- his debut conducting New York, taking over for Bruno Walter, that status kind of enabled him to have the platform to share his ideas. He was very, very outspoken, depending on the topic, and depending on where he was in his life, especially in the later years and kind of from the '60s on after he had assumed the New York Philharmonic music directorship. He was a celebrity, and he would be asked to comment on things, and politicians would depend on him to stump for them in certain capacities and to help raise money. He was even involved in supporting some of Ted Kennedy's anti-nuclear proliferation legislation, which is pretty remarkable, I think. And basically, if you were to dig through these collections, you could see much of the social and political history of the United States from the '40s through the '80s based on what he was doing and who he was engaging with. It's not necessarily him having an opinion on all of those in the objects, but you get to see the major inflection points, whether it's the Civil Rights Movement, the politicians. You basically can see a lot about the American Presidency and its relationship to the arts through Bernstein's collection, starting with Kennedy going through LBJ and so forth. And then when he chose very intentionally to not interact with folks like President Nixon and President Reagan, there's -- there's a lot of subtext behind the fact that there are no materials or relatively few materials about their interactions. So Bernstein wanted everything he did to -- to serve a purpose and to empower dialogue and to empower individuals to look at issues and cultural topics in a new light or to be able to express their own thoughts about them. So Lenny's background. He was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is up north, directly north of Boston, and it's a working-class small city nowadays, heavy Latino population, and complicated public schools issues nowadays. The family was very much a working-class Jewish, Boston suburban family at the time. Bernstein's father, Sam, ended up having a beauty supply company which did very, very well, and that helped them move up within the middle class to kind of be upper-middle-class eventually. His mother, Jennie, was very much a homemaker and supporting the family, and there was a lot of marital tension there that existed as a result of the kind of gender roles that were imposed and were the norm back then. And in Trouble in Tahiti, we'll get into some of the commentary about that. So Bernstein ended up getting into music. I'm not going to go into his old biography because I assume most of you know many of the highlights. But he went to Boston Latin, went on to Harvard, went on to Curtis, studied at Tanglewood, and ended up teaching at Tanglewood very early on. And these are some photos of him at Harvard graduation time. Harvard plays a big role in the political conversation, as we will get to, but think about what types of organizations he might have been engaging with and that you would have engaged with in college -- political organizations, cultural clubs, and some of this came to draw some scorn from folks like the FBI later on. This is a picture of Lenny with his parents early on. I think this is the one of the few photos that is out with that haircut, which is probably a good thing, and the sailor outfit. This is a taste of his relationship with Serge Koussevitzky and Aaron Copland. Copland was, of course, another major mentor, figure, and surrogate uncle to Bernstein throughout his musical career. And without these two gentlemen that you see on the screen here, there would be no Bernstein. It's very cut and dry with that. So here are the major topics that I see coming out of Bernstein's thinking, his correspondence, and his works. First off, race and race relations in the United States and beyond, gender, gender stereotypes, gender roles, heteronormativity, there's all kinds of stuff that can be unpacked there, and within the political world, he gets into every political issue of his time and then makes some very pointed statements about what is the military-industrial complex, how it came to be, and how that is kind of the problem behind most things going on in the United States. Which might not have changed depending on your interpretation. And then there's the question of public and private identity. That had a lot to do with how people present themselves in society in order to survive or in order to provoke and to advocate and to change the needles socially and then also for his own identity of having challenges with his -- expressing his sexuality publicly and having a marriage that was a heterosexual marriage and having children and how he negotiated all that was very emblematic of what was the norm in the time. But he did have, you know, struggles with either conveying this version of his authentic self or this version of his authentic self publicly and in his music. And that evolved as he went throughout his career quite a bit. But there's actually a really fascinating moment in the 1940s where he had been with his future wife, and they were engaged. They broke off the engagement and then after continued pushing from Koussevitzky, they became engaged again several years later, and it was during the honeymoon between Lenny and Felicia that he started composing Trouble in Tahiti, which is kind of interesting because Trouble in Tahiti is all about the problematic, fake veneer of what the American marriage is in the 1950s. So but a lot of love and interesting things to discuss. And then economics and class have a lot to do with his own experience and background growing up. And then that comes through extremely heavily in Trouble in Tahiti and also in Songfest when in one song that we're going to look at Julia de Burgos, she is a Puerto Rican immigrant who comes to the U.S. and a poet, and in her text and her overall persona, she is advancing and kind of considering what it means to be a Latino immigrant from within the United States in the United States. And there were big implications for her economically and professionally as a result of that. So what are some of the works that fall into these categories of -- of topics for discussion? So with race, West Side Story, of course, which I heard someone whispering, yes, that is very much at play here. The original concept when they started working on this piece was to have the Jews against the Catholics. And it turned out that there were actually a lot of plays addressing that topic on Broadway and off-Broadway around the time. So as they kind of kept moving along with the project over roughly 10 years, they shifted focus to comparing the Puerto Ricans to the -- the white folks in New York City with heavy Irish bent on the white side. So there's a lot of stereotypes that come out in the music, and that's a whole thing that can be unpacked, which I'm not going to unpack today for the sake of time. But it is there. There's a portrayal of Puerto Ricans, there's a portrayal of Puerto Ricans in gangs, and there are implications for how white society is perceiving the non-white Latino society at the time. But there's -- there's some problems with looking back at this type of setting. And that is now we have a different culture of what's PC and what's appropriate in terms of artistic expression for the kind of majority thinking. And at the time, this would not have been controversial in the way that it might be now to -- to certain folks. Other works that address race are Songfest, which we'll get into looking at one of the specific songs that sets a poem by Langston Hughes, I, Too Sing America and a poem by June Jordan called Okay, Negroes, and this very powerful, powerful, powerful song basically compares and contrasts by doing this with the lyrics, it intermingles the lyrics and assigns each poem a different musical style. It's a commentary on the African-American experience in the Harlem Renaissance, sorry, the African-American experience by the '60s and '70s, and what has advanced or regressed in -- in that kind of change in society. It's a remarkable work that many people don't know that he -- he composed. So I'm excited to preach the Bernstein gospel here with that. Gender is all over the place in a lot of different works, including Songfest and including in that specific song I, Too Sing America, Okay, Negroes. Gender is also the core concept that's looked at in Trouble in Tahiti. We also see it in Wonderful Town and On the Town, albeit in a more catchy Broadway kind of goofy, frivolous way. But there are a lot of stereotypes that are underlying those characters in those works. Politics is everywhere, kind of every one of these topics is super political, so there is a position being taken in most of these works by Bernstein. Public-private is also all over the place. The -- the most poignant instance of that, for me personally, at least, is the song To What You Said, also from Songfest, which sets a lost Walt Whitman text that he'd never released while he was alive, where there's a lot of subtext about sexuality and identity and interacting with -- with men and Bernstein choosing to set that in his bicentennial commission was a big deal, I think. And then economics and class again, Trouble in Tahiti, West Side Story with the -- the gang representations there, and many other works with all of these. If one was to go through Bernstein's entire output for anything that has text or a program or a very distinctive ethnic musical style, these topics are represented. Not all at every moment, but they're all within there. So, for example, Mass, Mass turned some religious figures minds on -- flipped them upside down in a lot of ways, so he took this Catholic mass tradition and infused it with rock towards the Jesus Christ Superstar kind of vein, not all the way there, and then infused Jewish traditions and views -- infused Protestant traditions. And it was this kind of melange of American religious evolution going on within one work. That was incredibly provocative. The Catholic Church was not pleased, which was interesting because it was a work that Jackie Kennedy commissioned for The Kennedy Center. So seeing that the Kennedys were diverging from the church at a certain point is a big deal, and that was, in many ways, represented by this work and how it was rolled out. Mass also was very interesting in its relationship to President Nixon, who was in office at the time of its premiere. The administration saw the work as subversive, which harken back to many of Bernstein's political issues in -- in the '50s that we'll go into in-depth in a moment. But there is actually a moment in the Nixon tapes, if you ever want to go digging online, where he discusses not wanting to go to this work -- this premiere, which he otherwise would have probably been there because it was the opening of The Kennedy Center because Bernstein was subverting his government, and it is on tape. It's mind-boggling. So jumping into the politics specifically, Bernstein was very much a liberal progressive. That is evident throughout his political candidates of choice who he supported, ranging from the Kennedys through to President -- then-candidate Carter when he was running against Ted Kennedy and being opposed to the conservative folks of Nixon and Reagan. Bernstein had a lot of interaction with LBJ's administration, which was kind of the carryover of having been Bernstein's chosen arts guru. And then those policy positions that he -- he was taking had a big role in kind of his embodiment of liberal, progressive politics. The relationship with the Kennedys is really special and remarkable, and you could spend your entire life just contemplating that based on the correspondences here. And there's also a lot of great material at the JFK Library in Boston, which is part of the National Archives System. I love to just start off this section with a recording of Bernstein himself talking about his origin story of interacting with JFK. [ Silence ] [ Inaudible ] >> Nelson Aldrich: The date is July 21st, 1965. This is Nelson Aldrich interviewing Leonard Bernstein, composer and music director of the New York Philharmonic. Well, Mr. Bernstein, when was the first time you met President Kennedy? >> Leonard Bernstein: I take it, you mean the first time I met President Kennedy? No, senator. >> Nelson Aldrich: Either -- which -- was the first time -- >> Leonard Bernstein: I met him first as a senator -- >> Nelson Aldrich: Yeah. >> Leonard Bernstein: -- in what I imagine was '54 when I was in Washington for reasons I have now forgotten, but which probably had to do with McCarthy if I -- if the date is right. And I was invited to have lunch with the senator and his wife at the Senate and to watch the Senate in action. And I date this back to McCarthy because I remember the big excitement of that day at the Senate was that McCarthy was about to make a speech of some importance. And we were all excited about visiting the Senate, which I had not attended before, and watching all this happen. As it turned out, McCarthy didn't show, and no speech was made. But I had a very good time anyway. >> Nelson Aldrich: Did Senator Kennedy give you an indication of how he felt about McCarthy? >> Leonard Bernstein: Yes. Yes. I had the feeling that contrary to some apparent evidence and a great deal of talk about his sympathies with McCarthy or his lack of antipathy, let's say, his lack of doing anything about it for which he was severely criticized, that his feelings lay wholly in antipathy to McCarthy. He was revolted. Of course, this was rather late in the McCarthy era, wasn't it? '54. When were the -- the Army McCarthy hearings? That would have been in the spring of that year. >> Nelson Aldrich: Yes. Yes. And he was censored in that year, too. >> Leonard Bernstein: He had already been censored, in other words. >> Nelson Aldrich: No, he was censored later in that year, I believe, in 1954. >> Leonard Bernstein: This was, I think, during the summer. I wish I could remember the exact circumstances or why I was there. >> Nicholas Alexander Brown: So that gives you a taste, and it's always nice to hear Lenny's voice, so there you have it. So there's a reference to McCarthy, and you heard all about the first interaction between Lenny and then-Senator Kennedy. One of the remarkable items in the Bernstein collection here is a letter that came from Mrs. Kennedy after that first meeting, which you know is typical, "Thank you. Nice to meet you. Wonderful to learn about your music, yada yada." But that letter is the start of an incredible correspondence between Jackie Kennedy throughout her life and Bernstein from the Senate years through the White House time after that. There's the very amazing and powerful letter that she wrote to Lenny in -- at 4:00 in the morning the night after RFK funeral mass where she just pours her heart out. And to see that type of expression of inner thinking by Mrs. Kennedy to Bernstein in that moment and setting indicates how strong their connection was. And she talks all about what the Mahler meant to her in that moment and how she had never heard it and how it was transcendent and -- and really took her to a different place. And I'm not sure if that's out over there. It is out. Great! So you'll have a chance to see that exact letter if you have not already. So going back to the '50s and McCarthy in the House un-American Activities Committee and the FBI, Bernstein was added to the list of enemies from within. This is after he had that amazing debut concert in New York. And there's a really great book that came out a few years ago by Barry Seldes, which is called Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician, which gives a comprehensive analysis of Bernstein's political interactions and also his declassified FBI file, which we're going to get into a little bit. So the people that were on this list were also deemed subversives in the vigilante publication Counterattack, and Bernstein was specifically on that one in February 26, 1950. And on this list, he was in bed with some good company Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and Charlie Chaplin. Going back to Bernstein's time at Harvard, he was in fact associated with some leftist groups, which understandably would have drawn the -- the ire of McCarthy and his crowd, but just as a little segue, this is a scan of the actual FBI declassified file, which is up on the FBI's website now, so it is very apropos for the title of this talk, which is hashtag Declassified, which the Library of Congress started before The Kennedy Center did just for the record and for posterity in the archives. So on this document, you see the list of groups that he was connected to in one form and another that merited his being investigated and placed on these lists. So you can see it ranges from American Youth for Democracy, which is apparently controversial, Joint Antifascist Refugee Committee, National Council of America and Soviet Friendship, National Negro Congress, Veterans of Abraham Lincoln Brigade, et cetera. One of the really fascinating things about these associations were that the student clubs that he was involved in that were leftist clubs at Harvard actually produce shows, and they were opportunities for him to do productions and to compose and to get some conducting chops. So he was definitely into these because of his political leanings, at least in some cases. And in other cases, he was more publicly involved because of the performance opportunities that he gained. So the -- the Communist witch hunt did have a major impact on Bernstein's career for a time. He had his passport revoked at one point and could not go out of the country. CBS, which had broadcast that famous 1943 concert, stopped working with him and Seldes, in his book, reports that Bernstein was officially in writing to be, quote, treated as a loyalty and security risk, end quote, if involved in overseas appearances. In 1951, he also had the privilege of being added to the FBI's Security Index, which I didn't even know this thing was a thing because I'm not necessarily a scholar of this period in American history, but being placed on this list meant that if there was a deemed a national security threat by the Communists who had infiltrated the United States, Leonard Bernstein would have been placed in a concentration camp, which is just mind-bogglingly horrible. And I, you know, I react physically to that. So this statement about his classification in these events -- investigations read, quote, the subject, Bernstein, is white male, native-born, and of the three possible categories -- Communist, Socialist Worker, or Independent Socialist League. He is the first Communist, end quote. Moving along into the 1950s, especially when this relationship with Kennedy evolved, Bernstein was able to lean on Kennedy for help in getting him out of this mess with the Communists, and that's kind of this moment in 1954, '53 with going to the Senate. As a result of the revocation of the passport, Bernstein, at one point in order to get it back, had to sign an affidavit swearing loyalty to the United States because being a citizen wasn't enough apparently at the time, and JFK was actually very specifically involved in keeping further investigations from taking place with the FBI. So this is all really a dark period in Lenny's career, even though on the outside, he's giving us this bubbly musical theater works and was very much a major American figure in classical music already. And so, the Civil Rights Movement was an important part of Leonard Bernstein's political engagement and his social identity as well. He was a supporter of Martin Luther King. He gave them money. He went to Alabama and participated with performances and in marches. And he maintained this financial support of MLKs movement even after MLK had been assassinated. And there's, of course, the very famous instance of his wife, technically, hosting a fundraiser, which was deemed a Black Panther fundraiser by the press and the society pages in New York. And they got a lot of flack from that. And the -- one of the other interesting items that I enjoy in the collection, which might not be out today, is a letter that Coretta Scott King dictated to her secretary in response to the Black Panther fundraiser. And the paraphrase of the letter is, I know you stand with us, and we're going to treat this as a mistake. Thanks. Which is pretty remarkable. And there's a letter, so check that out if you have time. Bernstein was heavily involved in causes supporting Israel, and he, of course, developed an important relationship with the Israel Philharmonic, as it is known now. He also performed famously in combat zones during various military conflicts over there, and someone shared an anecdote with me recently that there was one of these concerts where everyone had been given gas masks or other protective gear in the audience, and Bernstein refused any of that protection for himself and kept going in the concert, even though we're hearing the bombshells. We mentioned the mass connection with Nixon and his protests. And then I'd like to also just jump forward to the famous Beethoven 9 performance that he led when the Berlin Wall came down at the end of the -- end of the Cold War. And he famously changed the text from an die fruede, talking about brotherhood to an die freiheit, freedom. And he brought together an orchestra of musicians representing the major powers who had been on opposite sides of the Communist struggle. So there were British musicians, there were French musicians, there were German musicians, American musicians, and Russian musicians as well. That performance exists as a DVD, and it's on digital too, so you can check that out. It's also available in your local public library. This is a shot of Lenny speaking. At a fundraiser in 1962 for the -- the National Cultural Center, which would eventually become referred to as The Kennedy Center. Bernstein, as a result of his relationship with Mrs. Kennedy, he was actually invited to be the first leader of that institution, but his wife did not want that. So he actually had to rescind his acceptance of that offer at a certain point, which is kind of remarkable. And this is a really just special photo where you can see how close he was in his work to both the Kennedys and the -- the Johnson family. This is some more love for our National Archives partners. This is Leonard Bernstein's official invitation record as held by the Social Secretary during JFK's administration. The JFK Library has an immense amount of material connected to Bernstein's interaction with the Kennedys that isn't necessarily readily available on the digital side, and you'd have to kind of know where to go in through some of the specific office files to find these items, but you can go up there and hold this document. It's amazing, and it's totally open and free to the public. So you can see and hear that he was invited several times for -- for official functions including luncheons and dinners. Bernstein was one of the guests of honor for the famous concert that Pablo Casals gave at the White House, and Bernstein was also very involved in outreach to the Japanese government. There was a time when it was, I believe, the it was either the Prime Minister or the Foreign Minister of Japan came for a state dinner, and Bernstein was one of the handful of representatives of American arts and culture at the state dinner. And then Lenny was also so in with JFK that he would be going up to the residence floor of the White House with the head of state from the visiting country, and they would talk ideas late into the night, and you can see a lot of that documentation in the Kennedy Library's papers. Now, these are photos from Bernstein's datebooks, this is one of the hidden gems in the music division's collections. Here are most -- most of his date books. And you can go through and see what he was doing on any given day in history, which is remarkable. So in here, you see RFK's death represented, and he crosses off his plans of going to see the Bolshoi Ballet, and the same thing exists for -- for responding to JFK's assassination and then being in rehearsal for performing for the funeral for both of them. We're going to ship now briefly to Trouble in Tahiti. Troubling Tahiti was, as we said, composed between 1951 and 1952. It was a one-act opera. It basically follows the story of a very seemingly happily married couple that the father is doing great in the Mad Men kind of marketing executive world and the mother's home with the kids, and the son is named Junior. Except it is autobiographical about Bernstein's parents and also his own marriage. The father in the show's name, Sam, just like Bernstein's father, and the mother character, was named Jennie, originally after his mother. But then he decided that it was too apparently autobiographical by naming both of his parents. So he named his father's mother instead as the mother character, Dinah. Funny story. There's also a very famous device that he uses in this -- this show, if you're ever to listen to it, you hear the -- the opening, "Mornin' sun kisses the windows, doo doo doo doo," and then there's this jazz trio. The jazz trio was kind of him harkening back to -- to opera, where three singers could represent multiple characters and kind of represent multiple thinking strands that were happening simultaneously. Originally, the -- he had more than those three singers, and there were going to be all these minor roles actually portrayed, such as the shrink that Dinah goes to -- to get marriage advice from. But the trio ended up being the result of that -- that evolution. Trouble in Tahiti was later assumed into A Quiet Place, which is a full-length opera that went through different iterations as well. And it is also the continuation of the Trouble in Tahiti story or used as a flashback device where the entirety of Trouble in Tahiti is basically repurposed into this longer narrative. It is a commentary on lots of different things, so marriage, as we discussed, societal attitudes towards gender roles. Dinah is not happy with being a stay-at-home mom at all, and it comes out in the lyrics in a very sassy way, and they kind of struggle over the parenting of their son. The father goes to play, I believe it was like racquetball, and instead of going to his son's performance that evening, so there's this whole like daddy's going to work and not coming to my show, which was happening to Bernstein a little bit. In the end, interestingly, the mother has been complaining about this lack of presence by the father the whole time, and then she also skips this performance. So complicated. There's also a lot of representation of exoticism and not in a very constructive way. So this is the time when South Pacific was in its original run on Broadway, and this was after World War 2. This was the time of the Korean War, and there is a very harsh representation of South Pacific cultures in the fictional Trouble in Tahiti film that is within the play. It's like a play within the play. Dinah goes to see this film in the afternoon while her husband is off at work or doing other things. And the music is like stereotypical luau kind of sound. And it's like, oh, all the -- the -- the white or American colonialists show up to save the native peoples. And it's hugely problematic, but very much a commentary on the attitudes of the time and reflection on what was the attitude at the end of World War 2 and then going into Korea. So as you can see, the juxtaposition of, you know, what's that ideal family unit from the early 1950s or later into the 1950s. On the left, this is a magazine ad. Very much gender roles. The wife is in charge of the household. She's checking the list. The husband seems very proud of his accomplishment of showing up with the groceries. There's also a commentary about infidelity in this work in Trouble in Tahiti, and Diana is concerned that her husband is cheating on her with his secretary. And so that's the whole narrative with the shrink is around that. And then it turns out, depending on the interpretation, that something has happened. It seems more towards the MeToo side than the -- the kind of consensual, longer-term relationship. But there is some content in there to unpack if you were to do a deep dive. This is Bernstein looking on at the construction of the set of Trouble in Tahiti at Brandeis, where it premiered in 1942 as part of the first Brandeis Festival of the Arts. Him looking like a movie star practicing -- rehearsing. And then Felicia looking stricken off, going off onto their honeymoon when Trouble in Tahiti was first written. Moving on to Songfest because I know we're running out of time. Songfest, as we mentioned, was commissioned for the bicentennial at the Kennedy Center. It was to be a song cycle. He did not deliver on time, so he performed bits of it in different places, including with the Israel Philharmonic. It was eventually performed in its entirety at The Kennedy Center and was actually mounted there this past fall as they're opening concert of the season-long of Bernstein centennial celebrations. It will also be mounted again this summer by Wolf Trap at University of Maryland. So you're welcome to hear it there. It is rarely performed live, except for this kind of concentrated period of Bernstein commemoration, but in my humble opinion, it is the most impactful work that he composed in terms of reaching the diverse -- or conveying his thinking about the widest range of social identity topics. And he uses the poetry as the device to kind of engage in those different conversations. So if you don't recognize all the faces there, you can see the poem -- the poets who he sat and listed here Frank O'Hara, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Julia de Burgos, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and June Jordan, Ann Bradstreet, Gertrude Stein, E.E. Cummings, Conrad Aiken, Gregory Corso, Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose papers are also here at the Library of Congress, and Edgar Allan Poe. There's this very diverse representation of American poetry over the course of many, many, many years. The -- the poems get into everything ranging from the public and private identity, which is the To What You Said, number four, with the Walt Whitman. Julia de Burgos is the Puerto Rican immigrant experience, and also there's a heavy discussion about, yes, the race issues, but also the gender issues there that existed with the workplace and her -- her experience. Interestingly, Julia de Burgos was a fed later on in her life and worked here in Washington, and she was actually just covered in the New York Times in their new series of obituaries for major women figures who were ignored when they actually passed. So I encourage you are checking that out, especially in this moment where Puerto Rican -- the Puerto Rican experience is hopefully still in the forefront of our minds as there's ongoing migration challenges there. The closing poem Israfel deals with a -- a figure from Islam, and the text of that song is very powerful and kind of discussing and implying the way that music can help unite us. And it's a little dark in some ways, but it is kind of the culmination of what all of these negative things that are going on, but that there's an optimism behind the unification. And that's very much Bernstein's idea with American social identity and how to advance the challenges in our society. Is -- there has to be a positive and safe dialogue that advances things together with the folks with different perspectives because it can't just be a -- a one-way train. So this is the call to action that I think summarizes Bernstein's thinking about this, and it's actually the -- the festival statement from the Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts from 1952 that he was the director of as a whole, and that's where he conducted the premiere of Trouble in Tahiti. Interestingly, also on that festival was the U.S. premiere of Mark Blitzstein's translation of The Threepenny Opera, and there are some great photos of Bernstein and Blitzstein working together at that time. Blitzstein is represented in the collections here widely. He was unfortunately killed in a gay bashing later on in the 20th century, which was really sad and affected Bernstein deeply. So just to share with you part of this quote, quote, this is a moment of inquiry for the whole world, a moment when civilization looks at itself appraising, seeking a key to the future. And then, he talks about the festival context. We cannot pretend to wisdom, but through performance, we can provoke thought and free discussion through discussing, we can learn, and through learning, we can rediscover our culture and ourselves. And I think one of the really amazing things about this centennial year is that we're able to look back and spend time exploring more of Bernstein than we haven't all been familiar with. We've all come to Bernstein through a different lens and through a different angle, whether it's through his musical theater works, his traditional classical works. We didn't even get into the symphonies. There's -- there's a lot to unpack there with social identity, especially with the Second Symphony, The Age of Anxiety, which sets the famous Auden text, and then also the Kaddish, which brings in a lot of the tropes from the -- from Judaism. But Bernstein really, he did so much, and we're -- we're very fortunate that he did so much so well. And I think there's a starting point for all of us to jump in through his music into some of these conversations that we're having in our society now, whether it's politics, whether it's race, gender, identity, Bernstein, in his music, can create some safe spaces for us all. So that is kind of the -- the overview that sets you up for seeing some materials. So these are materials that you are going to be able to see now that are separate from the main display today. We have out on the table in the back corner there, and everyone stay put until till I get over there, on the table are excerpts from the full orchestra manuscript of Songfest. There are the first couple of pages of the Langston Hughes, and June Jordan combined work and also the texts of those poems out, so you can see the difference in the text. And while we're over there, I'm actually going to play Songfest for you so you can hear it in the background and keep an ear out for the juxtaposition of a very art music kind of hairy, burly, vocal writings style for the Langston Hughes text. And then the June Jordan text has a kind of very caricature, bluesy, folk sound for the June Jordan text. And again, June Jordan is as a lesbian feminist from Berkeley, California, in the '60s, looking back and saying, wow, things actually might have been better in some ways during the Renaissance, which is a heavy statement. So check that out. There's also the manuscript from Julia de Burgos, so the song about the Puerto Rican women experience coming into the United States. There's one of Bernstein's Allied Forces passes from 1948 of going into Vienna, which is kind of nifty. There are his remarks from the Carter-Kennedy unity dinner, which he gave when Ted Kennedy had finally conceded from the primary campaign for President, and the Democratic Party was trying to bring the Carter camp together with the Ted Kennedy camp. So there are some interesting remarks there, and it's very, very interesting to me to see Bernstein as an artist being the figure put forward to -- to talk an entire political party back into shape and to unification. So that also is an indication of his weight in society beyond just the performing arts world. We also have a speech he gave at a Brandeis University dinner in New York that discusses his opinions about the military-industrial complex. So you can see on paper there his -- his thinking. And we also have a manuscript from tonight from West Side Story just because, and West Side Story, of course, connects to the racial topics here. And in that closing tonight sequence, you get not on the page that's visible there, but you get all of the different voices coming together with their different stories. And you know, the text is all over the place. You can't understand anything when it's that ensemble moment, and that's kind of what -- what's great about us, right? That is, we all have our different things going on, and we all need to be able to coexist no matter what the obstacles. So thank you for your attention. I will get over there to help answer questions and describe the items. Please do not touch any of the items. Only curatorial staff will be able to do that. It is a circular table, so it's pretty easy to go around. And thank you so much for being here, and enjoy the rest of the day. [ Applause ]