MUSIC : Look Out, It’s Lennymania! : Unrestrainable in life, Leonard Bernstein gets a no-holds-barred 75th-birthday party, celebrating his music and legend in a flurry of videos, concerts and, um, coffee mugs

Next month, Leonard Bernstein would have turned 75, and it is hard even to imagine the level of extravagance the celebrations might have reached were he still alive. Nearly everything about Bernstein--the good and bad--bespoke an excess that seemed only to increase with each passing year. And nothing quite became him like a party.

But it has been nearly three years since his body could finally take no more cigarettes, Scotch, sexual indulgence, conducting, piano playing, recording, teaching, composing, traveling, writing, late-night philosophizing, political agitating, enduring his famous self-doubting bouts of insomnia, or submitting to the perennial demands of celebrity. It might seem time for America’s most famous and indefatigable classical musician to finally get some rest.

That’s generally what happens when conductors die. “The conductor needs first and foremost to have the live, physical presence,” said Leonard Slatkin, musical director of the St. Louis Symphony and a conductor often associated with Bernstein’s music. “No one pays much attention anymore to Herbert von Karajan,” he noted of the German conductor who died shortly before Bernstein and was the most powerful conductor in Europe, “let alone to someone like Eugene Ormandy, who used to be such a major figure.”

But Bernstein, who broke all the rules and became larger than life, has broken one more, and, remarkably, become larger than death. The calendar of official events of the Leonard Bernstein 75th Birthday Commemoration, published by the Leonard Bernstein Society, runs six double-column pages of small type, listing concerts slated and innumerable recordings and videos, old and new, to be released between June 1 and Nov. 14, the third anniversary of Bernstein’s death. From Mexico City to Maastricht, Netherlands, from Bombay, India, to Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, to Beverly Hills and just about everywhere in between you will be able to hear concerts commemorating Bernstein’s music. If you happen, on the actual birthday, Aug. 25, to be in Rimini, Italy, or in New York City or at the Hollywood Bowl, you will be able to attend birthday observances.

Even if you only happen to be vegetating near a television set on Aug. 25, you will be able to participate in the celebration: On that date, Sony Classical, in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and the Leonard Bernstein Society, will begin releasing, for the first time on home video, 25 of the legendary “Young People’s Concerts” Bernstein broadcast on television for about a dozen years, beginning in the late ‘50s.

The release of the “Young People’s Concerts,” which haven’t been seen except at special screenings since their original broadcasts on CBS, have generated a terrific amount of interest, especially among the Baby Boom generation that grew up with them. Although the release is still more than a month away, the New York Review of Books has already run a major appreciation of them. In addition, the Atlantic ran a cover story in June on Bernstein, stimulated in great part because of the release. At a time when it is next to impossible for a classical musician to get on the cover of a mass circulation American magazine, for Bernstein to retain that kind of interest well after his death is extraordinary.

There is much that lies behind this Lennymania. Some of it is sheer everyday commercialism. Bernstein’s was the most documented career ever in classical music, and there is a seemingly bottomless pit of marketable materials for reissue. The marketability is also enhanced by a current nostalgia vogue, especially for the ‘50s and ‘60s when Bernstein was such a dashing figure. It seems hardly a coincidence that the New York Philharmonic attracted considerable attention last month when it presented a “Remembering Lenny” tribute, while across the Lincoln Center plaza New York City Ballet was filling its theater nightly by trucking in similar nostalgia and bringing back Balanchine.

Certainly commercialism explains some of the ongoing Bernstein glut--and some of its more questionable extremes, such as the selling of Bernstein coffee mugs by what has become a complex Bernstein cottage industry run by the family. The profits, however, help finance more worthy enterprises such as the Leonard Bernstein Center for Education through the Arts in Nashville, Tenn. There is even a quarterly newsletter, “Prelude, Fugue & Riffs,” published by the Leonard Bernstein Society for “the friends of Leonard Bernstein,” which means anybody who asks for it.

The nostalgia, the tons of documentation, the sheer dominance of Bernstein’s presence on American music for half a century presupposes that Bernstein was known and admired, and that he is missed for that. But some of what is fueling Bernstein’s continued prominence is that he wasn’t known or understood or even liked nearly as much as we might think. Indeed there is now a widespread attitude that not only does Bernstein need to be rediscovered, but that much of what was once found lacking in him may just prove to be a way to solve some of the crises that classical music has fallen into.

There is, especially, a huge expectation for the home video issue of the “Young People’s Concerts.” Orchestras, for instance, have found that they must now take on the burden of music education if they are to survive. Their audiences are graying and public schools, which rarely teach music any longer, are not inspiring young listeners, leaving most kids to be distracted by rock and video.

But can something as dated as low-budget 30-year-old television shows appeal to sophisticated modern visual tastes? They were filmed in black-and-white and without a lot of production value--Bernstein, a camera and the New York Philharmonic on hand for demonstration purposes. The earliest ones were made before videotape and were broadcast live. There was only a morning to do them in, and they had to be kept simple.

Humphrey Burton, who directed a number of later, far more elaborate Bernstein video concerts and documentaries and who is currently writing the authorized biography of Bernstein, says, “I used to be rather sniffy about them when I was working for the BBC.” But on reviewing them lately he now finds “that while the apparatus is so simple as to be clumsy, the point of the programs was Bernstein himself. Bernstein was not afraid of educating and entertaining simultaneously, and because he was such a charmer, it worked.”

The appeal of the “Young People’s Concerts” is actually an advanced one, as David Schiff--a composer, music professor at Reed College and an authority on the complex music of Elliott Carter--indicates in his enthusiastic reappraisal of Bernstein in the Atlantic. But after taking readers through a detailed analysis of the program “What Is a Melody?” which Bernstein begins audaciously with the Prelude to “Tristan und Isolde,” Schiff admiringly concludes: “I have never witnessed better teaching anywhere.”

However, Slatkin, who has begun offering previews of his own concerts with the St. Louis Symphony on local television, finds the “Young People’s Concerts” more of interest as a model than as actual material for today’s young viewers. “Bernstein was the first to see television as the way to communicate with the public,” he says, “but it was a different time. He did it on a mass level, but now more conductors will have to get involved with the audience on a more personal level and take the next step, which is interactive technology. I’m afraid the old shows just look too dated for us.”

The most controversial aspect of Bernstein’s career was his composing, and it is the music that is, perhaps, undergoing the greatest re-evaluation right now. Bernstein was an insecure, tormented composer. His songs for shows from the ‘40s and ‘50s, such as “On the Town” and “West Side Story,” were popular successes at a time when popularity was a suspicious quality in classical music. In his concert works he compensated by taking on big spiritual or literary themes that could seem pretentious while his musical style was always a nervous blend of brazen New York jazziness and the elevated. Never able to adapt to the modernist tide of atonality, he tried to stay hip by infusing his music with up-to-date pop, but by the time he inserted soft-rock into his polyglot 1970 “Mass,” he had come to be seen as the epitome of un-hip.

Now, however, Bernstein, who had hoped his music would be his most lasting legacy, is increasingly being hailed as the patriarch of postmodernism. His multistylistic music and his dogged allegiance to tonality could not be more in fashion today. In fact, it would have been unheard of for young American composers to mimic Bernstein’s music even a couple years ago. But the most-talked-about new American opera last season, Daron Hagen’s opera about Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Shining Brow,” given by Madison Opera in April, turned out to be proudly derivative of Bernstein’s troubled opera, “A Quiet Place,” an opera that was mostly “pissed upon,” as Burton puts it, when first performed in the ‘80s. Moreover, a surprising number of young New York composers were on hand for Slatkin’s Bernstein program with the New York Philharmonic during the “Remembering Lenny” week.

Just how well the music will hold up remains to be seen, but it has taken Bernstein’s passing for it to get a chance. Burton credits that to the fact that other conductors were simply too intimidated to perform it while Bernstein was alive and was his own best proponent.

Slatkin agrees that the music can’t possibly survive unless it can be seen from points of view different from Bernstein’s. For his new recording of Bernstein’s 1976 song cycle to American poems, “Songfest,” Slatkin says he purposely didn’t listen to Bernstein’s recording so that he could form his own ideas about it. “If people don’t come along and reinterpret this music there is no point in doing it, and we’re all in trouble.”

Like the many musics his music was, Bernstein’s appeal today seems to be based in the fact that through a long and multifaceted career in music he reached an unpredictably varied public. His early conducting style, with his trademark exuberance, was a great draw to general audiences, although it was much attacked by critics. His later interpretations turned controversially slow and spiritual, and were often more intended for the connoisseur than the casual listener.

But the breadth of that appeal remained breathtaking. At the end of his life, he had become the most celebrated conductor in Europe. Yet he could still engage a decidedly avant-garde composer like Raphael Mostel, who writes a uniquely mystical music for his Tibetan Singing Bowl Ensemble and seems much closer aesthetically to John Cage than Bernstein. “Bernstein did so much more than what your average musical tour guide would do, by saying this is what is on your left and that is what is on your right. With Bernstein, you really were right there. He was a very important force and he will remain so.”

Ultimately, Bernstein, in his music, in his conducting, in his teaching, and especially in his life, was a battlefield between the sacred and the profane. Plagued by the conflict, it led him to some of his most enduring work and drove him to some of his most embarrassing extremes. It is what keeps him so interesting to us now. But it is also mirrored in the larger simultaneous canonization and commercialization of Leonard Bernstein, the institution.

Examples of it are everywhere. Bernstein’s record company of his late years, Deutsche Grammophon, will, for instance, release this fall a stellar live concert performance of Bernstein’s early musical “On the Town,” conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, that should only further enhance the living durability of Bernstein’s music. But at the same time the company will bring out a creepy brand-new recording of Jessye Norman singing “Somewhere,” from “West Side Story,” with Bernstein conducting, although the session occurred this year, long after the conductor’s death. Norman’s performance was dubbed onto the Bernstein track from his recording of the song several years ago with Marilyn Horne.

Likewise, Sony Classical has been reissuing many of Bernstein’s dynamic, youthful recordings he made with the New York Philharmonic in sprightly, remastered sound that are causing an ecstatic critical re-evaluation of Bernstein’s early career. However, the 119 CDs are coming out in the uniform Royal Edition, each package prominently featuring a frilly watercolor by Prince Charles for no other reason than that the owners seem to think all celebrity is equivalent.

And then there are those coffee mugs, which seem to engender snide remarks in almost every conversation and every article about Bernstein’s legacy these days.

It may just all be too much. Certainly Slatkin thinks so, and he is especially leery of too much nostalgia for Lenny. “Ultimately, Bernstein is a phenomenon we have to get past,” Slatkin feels. “Everyone talks about who’s going to replace him. Well, no one is.

“He was very much somebody of his own time who will never happen again in that way. I don’t think a major figure in music will ever emerge like that again, because of the way society is now.

“It’s a different time and things will move in different ways. No one dominant personality will emerge, but many less dominant people will deal with their situations in a more regionalized manner, not in a national or international manner.”

But that, of course, first means getting past a lot of concerts, CDs, videos, books and coffee mugs. So for now, it looks like Lenny’s here to stay.*