Professor Lenny

The seminar called Music 180 was 30 minutes into its dissection of Stravinsky's Sonata for Two Pianos when the door flew open and a 5-ft. 8 1/2-in. whirlwind spun into the room, flung a fur coat onto a chair, affectionately pinched the cheek of Professor Leon Kirchner and subsided into a sitting position on the floor. It was "retired" Superconductor Leonard Bernstein, now 54, making his rounds at Harvard as the new Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry.*

In characteristic Bernstein style, Lenny relaxed for only a few moments as a pair of suddenly awe-struck students resumed playing the sonata. Then he jumped to his feet. "No, no," he said. "You play it without feeling. Too much staccato. Please, please, play this more smoothly." Bumping a student as he lunged toward the piano, Bernstein apologized: "I've been to twelve hours of classes today. That can make you a little dizzy."

Then, fingers poised over the keys, came a cry: "My God, I can't play the piano any more." That remark was pure melodrama. After listening to Bernstein's brief run-through, the students tried again, and now they brought the piece to life. Satisfied, the visiting professor dropped back to his seat on the floor, extracted a cigarette from a leather case, and listened to a student wind quintet attack Irving Fine's Partita. Halfway through the first movement, Bernstein leaped to his feet again. "Tune up!" he cried. "My God, tune up!" While the musicians trembled, he went on: "This piece is whimsical. It's full of surprises. It should be played with energy and bounce." When the quintet failed to pick up, Bernstein raised his arms and led the undergraduates as energetically as if he were still conducting the New York Philharmonic. When the seminar ended, the students were exhausted. Lenny was as fresh as ever.

For Bernstein (class of '39), being a professor has provided pleasant surprises. "When I was at Harvard," he says, "no one was making music. I'm so happy to hear music at Harvard now." He has been hearing music elsewhere in Boston as well. During his six-week visit this fall, he worked with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and his rehearsals and concerts were videotaped for the lectures he will deliver during another six-week residence next spring.

For all his professed attempts at maintaining a low profile, he has been perhaps the single most visible personage around the Yard--attending classes, helping music professors and spending evenings in long talk sessions with students in his suite at Eliot House. "Warmth isn't the word for what I feel in coming back," he says. "I have a penchant for sentimentality, especially where Harvard is concerned."

* The Norton professorship, a one-year post established in 1925, conceives poetry broadly to include all the arts.

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