IN MEMORIAM : Bravo, Maestro

Leonard Bernstein, who died Sunday at the age of 72, was in some deep sense the embodiment of that self-confident cultural maturity America achieved in this century’s middle years.

It now is possible, for example, to read much that once seemed prodigal or idiosyncratic about him as the intuitive progress of an artist who enjoyed not only the courage of his convictions but also of his affections.

Had his part been played by another sort of artist one easily can imagine an America that might well have remained little more than an aesthetic province of Europe’s great tradition.

But, in Bernstein, American culture found a champion who was master of that great tradition while remaining entirely comfortable with the fact of his American origins. In his hands, the artist’s unavoidable process of self-invention always was an act of affirmation rather than denial.

He loved jazz, our authentic vernacular art music, and its expressive invention animated some of his finest work. He loved the musical theater, our vernacular opera; to it, he brought the great tradition’s rigor and nobility of spirit; from it, he took the vigor of a vibrant popular culture.

In search of inspiration for his own compositions, he returned again and again to the nourishing wellspring of his Judaism: to Jeremiah, that scold of a prophet, to the dark comfort of the Kaddish, to the sweetness of the Psalms, to the legend of the dybbuk.

And yet for all of this, there was no part of his life or work that might be called sectarian, provincial or triumphal. His achievement was astonishing.