My former nemesis, Hollywood producer-writer Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal (see Stephen Gyllenhaal), for years tried to get her project for son Jake Gyllenhaal off the ground: a film based on Bernstein’s decades-long love affair with an Israeli journalist-soldier-actor named Azaria Rapoport—the drama culminating in the 1981 premiere in Jerusalem of the conductor’s 16-minute piece for flute and orchestra, Halil (meaning flute), dedicated to young Israeli flutist-soldier (every Israeli is considered a front-line soldier) Yadin Tanenbaum, killed in the Yom Kippur war. The film was to be called Nocturne, which is how Bernstein himself described this work.
Above: Halil by Leonard Bernstein (Moscow, Maria Fedotova soloist)
But now I understand there’s a new movie out about my beloved rabbi of music that turns him into nothing more than half of some concocted New York glamour couple. Kind of like that smart-alecky piece by journalist Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, which was required reading in high school in Minneapolis, circa 1970; we were not-so-subtly encouraged to side with the Black Panthers (which was okay, my first boyfriend was a Black Panther) while snickering at Lenny and Felicia. This did not sit well with me at 15, a faithful viewer of Bernstein’s monthly Young People’s Concerts (all episodes here) on CBS Sunday afternoons (1958-1972). Call me a Lenny groupie, more or less. Just like Lydia Tár.
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 