When Leonard Bernstein listed the great works of the 20th century
Widely regarded as one of the most significant musical pioneers of the 20th century, American conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein‘s contributions to music are simply invaluable. The recipient of almost every major award related to his field, Bernstein had an eclectic range of inspiration when it came to music genres, but it wasn’t just music that moved him. From modernist poetry to cinema, he appreciated everything that contributed to the great philosophical discourse of his time.
In 1972, Bernstein accepted a position at Harvard, where he delivered a series of lectures titled The Unanswered Questions. In it, he explored various subjects, such as Noam Chomsky’s theories about language and their application within musical frameworks, but one of the most striking segments is the fifth lecture, in which he elaborated on the overwhelming artistic crisis of the 20th century. While doing so, he ended up listing the definitive masterpieces of the period.
Bernstein began: “In fact, all the truly great works of our century have been borne of despair or of protest or of a refuge from both, but anguish informs them all. Think of Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ The Stranger, Gide’s The Counterfeiters, The Sun Also Rises, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus. The Last of the Just, even Lolita. And Picasso’s Guernica. And [Giorgio De] Chirico, [Salvador] Dalí. And Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, Murder in the Cathedral, Four Quartets.”
According to the revered conductor, all the great works of art that captured the public imagination during the 20th century have been united by common philosophical underpinnings of despair and death. Ranging from Federico Fellini’s incredible masterpiece La Dolce Vita to The Beatles’ vastly influential album Revolver, the art of the previous century was created as a response to the crisis of despair and disillusionment.
Elaborating on this phenomenon, Bernstein also talked about the importance of faith: “We’re now face to face with the truly ultimate ambiguity, which is the human spirit. This is the most fascinating ambiguity of all, that is, as each of us grows up, the mark of our maturity is that we learn to accept our mortality, and yet, we persist in our search for immortality. We may believe it’s all transient, even that it’s all over, yet we believe in a future. We believe.”
He added: “We emerge from the cinema after three hours of the most abject degeneracy in a film such as La Dolce Vita, and we emerge on wings, from the sheer creativity of it. We can fly on to a future. And the same is true after witnessing the hopelessness of Godot in the theatre or after the aggressive violence of The Rite of Spring in the concert hall. Or even after listening to the bittersweet young cynicism of an album called Revolver. We have wings to fly on. We have to believe in that kind of creativity, I know I do.”
Check out the full list below.
Leonard Bernstein lists the greatest 20th century work:
- Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
- The Stranger – Albert Camus
- The Counterfeiters – André Gide
- The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
- The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
- Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
- The Last of the Just – André Schwarz-Bart
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- Guernica – Pablo Picasso
- The works of Giorgio De Chirico
- The works of Salvador Dalí
- The Cocktail Party – T.S. Eliot
- Murder in the Cathedral – T.S. Eliot
- Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot
- The Age of Anxiety – W.H. Auden
- For the Time Being – W.H. Auden
- The works of Boris Pasternak
- The works of Pablo Neruda
- The works of Sylvia Plath
- ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – The Beatles
- ‘A Day in the Life’ – The Beatles
- ‘She’s Leaving Home’ – The Beatles
- La Dolce Vita – Federico Fellini
- Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
- Mother Courage and Her Children – Bertolt Brecht, Margarete Steffin
- The Rite of Spring – Igor Stravinsky
- Revolver – The Beatles
