With Maestro now streaming on Netflix—and nominated for four Golden Globe Awards—it’s high time I set the record straight about the Cranbrook House Steinway Grand and its most famous pianist, Leonard Bernstein. It is a legendary story, told and retold for decades, that places Bernstein composing none other than his most famous work, West Side Story, here, at Cranbrook.
It is a story, however, that is hard to unravel fact from fiction. So, like all Center historians and archivists, I started by doing some digging in Cranbrook Archives. This is the story I uncovered.
First, the Piano
Cranbrook has several Steinway grand pianos, including two of the grandest: a Model D concert grand in Page Hall on the original School for Boys campus, and a second Model D in the Cranbrook House Library. The Cranbrook House concert grand piano was manufactured by Steinway & Sons of New York City and completed a little more than eighty-five years ago on December 18, 1929. It was purchased by Grinnell Brothers of Detroit in January 1930 and, later that year, sold to the Colony Town Club, a women’s club located on East Jefferson Avenue in Detroit.
Enter, George Booth
The black concert grand piano was to have a short life at the Colony Town Club. Within a few years, its members sold it back to Grinnell Brothers where, in February 1935, it was purchased by George Booth. I remain intrigued by the fact that Booth purchased a “pre-owned” piano. While America was in the throes of the Great Depression, I think it was more than a simple cost-saving measure; it was a decision warranted by the piano’s intended use.
The piano did not begin its life at Cranbrook in the Booths’ Library, the center of their social life after it was completed in 1919. Rather, Booth first placed the piano in the main hall of the Cranbrook Pavilion on Lone Pine Road. Known today as St. Dunstan’s Playhouse, in 1935 the recently renovated pavilion was being used as an exhibition gallery and event space for the Academy of Art and its nascent Art Museum. The piano was played at exhibition openings and for preludes before lectures, including at least one by Frank Lloyd Wright. Although St. Dunstan’s Guild began using the pavilion in 1937 for rehearsals and storage, Cranbrook Academy of Art continued to hold exhibitions there until 1942, when the new Eliel Saarinen-designed museum opened.
Sometime between 1942 and the summer of 1946, when the pavilion was cleared out and rented by the Cranbrook Foundation to St. Dunstan’s Guild, George Booth moved the Steinway down the road to Christ Church Cranbrook “to protect the instrument from damage by dampness or other causes and to give it the benefit of expert use.” It was also during this period, in March 1944, that George and Ellen Booth formally deeded to the Cranbrook Foundation the Homestead Property, which encompassed not only Cranbrook House but also the forty acres adjacent to the house, including the Cranbrook Pavilion and its Steinway.
Enter, Leonard Bernstein
In the spring of 1946, Bernstein traveled to Detroit for several concerts in March and April, including one on April 5th at Detroit’s Music Hall where he conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
During this time, Zoltan Sepeshy, the Hungarian Head of the Academy’s Painting Department and soon to be its Director, invited Bernstein to visit Cranbrook for a three-week respite before he traveled to Europe. While we do not know the details, a contemporary newspaper clipping noted that Sepeshy and Bernstein had met in New York.
The musician took him up on the offer and, after playing a concert broadcast from Sam’s Cut-Rate Department Store in Detroit on April 7th, he traveled to Bloomfield Hills and stayed at the Academy of Art. Not surprisingly, Bernstein later commented on his host’s “spartan” guest accommodations—he was, after all, staying in the student dorms.
In advance of Bernstein’s arrival, the Sepeshys had the piano moved from Christ Church back to the Cranbrook Pavilion and, according to Zoltan’s wife Dorothy Sepeshy, the musician was given a key to the space and the privacy he needed to compose during his stay. At the end of the day, Bernstein often had drinks and dinner with the Sepeshys, and enjoyed walking the grounds.
Reporting on what was to be this upcoming “three-week rest” at Cranbrook in advance of a scheduled trip to Europe, The Detroit Times noted that Bernstein planned to “complete work on his First Piano Concerto, the draft of which [was] already written.” Bernstein conducted two more broadcasts at Sam’s Cut-Rate Department Store (yes, that really was the store’s name) on April 14th and 21st, before ending his truncated two-week rest at Cranbrook and returning to New York City on April 22nd.
Reenter, Leonard Bernstein (forty years later)
Bernstein returned to Cranbrook in August 1986. He was in the area to conduct a concert of the New York Philharmonic at the Meadow Brook Music Festival. The concert, which took place on Wednesday, August 13th, included performances of Bernstein’s own Overture to “Candide”; his Serenade for Solo Violin, String Orchestra, Harp and Percussion; and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Opus 74 (the Symphonie Pathetique).
While in town, Henry Booth, who after his parents’ deaths in the late 1940s assumed the mantle of volunteer leadership at Cranbrook, had persuaded the composer and conductor to return to Cranbrook and discuss the formation of a composarium (a concept and word conceived by Henry). Henry Booth and Bernstein were joined by then Cranbrook President Dr. Lillian Bauder and Archivist Mark Coir. Alas, a very young Art Museum curator by the name of Greg Wittkopp was not invited to be a part of the conversation!
The composarium, which would have established a program for musicians and composers to live and work on campus, much like Bernstein had done in the mid-1940s, was a long-standing idea Henry Booth conceived to provide a life for his residence, Thornlea, after his death. Earlier that same year, Booth had invited Bernstein to serve as Honorary Chairman of the National Advisory Council of the Composarium, an offer that he accepted after noting that he thought it to be “a wonderful idea.” Bernstein, in fact, also brought Aaron Copeland to the table of this National Advisory Council.
It was during this visit in 1986 that the sixty-eight-year-old Bernstein, with Dr. Bauder and Mark Coir as his witnesses, not only recalled his 1946 visit to Cranbrook, noting that he was working on what would become his 1949 Symphony No. 2 (The Age of Anxiety), but also—and this is where the myth began—recalled a second visit to Cranbrook in 1957 during which he remembered working on West Side Story, which premiered in August of that same year.
While it is hard to refute the personal memories of the composer himself, they are memories that the archival record indicates may have been incorrectly seeded by Henry Booth who, by that time, was eighty-nine years old.
An Archivist Takes a Trip
A few years later, our former Head Archivist, Leslie Edwards, did some more research, this time in Washington, D.C. According to the Leonard Bernstein Day Books at the Library of Congress, it is highly unlikely that the composer traveled to Michigan in 1957, the year of his purported second trip to Cranbrook.
For the two years leading up to the opening of West Side Story, Bernstein worked non-stop on the production, with almost daily meetings in New York. As for his 1946 visit to Cranbrook, the one that most certainly took place, the Library of Congress Senior Music Specialist Mark Horowitz believes it is more likely that the piece Bernstein was working on at Cranbrook was Facsimile –Choreographic Essay for Orchestra, which premiered in October of 1946, six months after his two-week rest at Cranbrook, not Symphony No. 2.
Bernstein died on October 15, 1990, in his apartment at The Dakota on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, four years after what was most likely his second and not his third visit to Cranbrook.
Enter, Jamie Bernstein
As a final footnote, let’s return to West Side Story and the myth of its composition at Cranbrook. Another musicologist, Mary Abt, told me that it was not uncommon for Bernstein to take an early musical “sketch” and decades later incorporate it into a composition.
It was a theory that I presented to a group of Cranbrook Schools parents—with Jamie Bernstein as my witness—during her first visit to Cranbrook in March 2023, following the publication of her book, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein. I asked the composer’s daughter if one of her father’s 1946 Cranbrook “sketches” could have become West Side Story. She replied that it was entirely plausible.
First Piano Concert, Symphony No. 2, Facsimile, or West Side Story. While we may never know the truth of what Leonard Bernstein was writing at Cranbrook, it is all part of a fascinating history of the Model D Steinway Concert Grand piano, now lovingly restored by the members Cranbrook House & Gardens Auxiliary and proudly displayed—and still played—in the Cranbrook House Library.
– Gregory Wittkopp, Director, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
The author gratefully acknowledges the research of former Cranbrook archivists Mark Coir and Leslie Edwards. Their memos are part of the 2.5 million documents and photographs that comprise the collections of Cranbrook Archives—the DNA of Cranbrook and the heart of Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research.
To learn more:
Jamie Bernstein will be making her second visit to Cranbrook later in January when she will speak with Cranbrook students and parents, accompanied by a pianist, about her father’s career and her own life in music. As you might have expected, the event is a at maximum capacity.
Henry Booth and the national stage he created for music at Cranbrook will be the subject of the Center’s sixth annual House Party at Cranbrook, which will be chaired by Carolynn and Aaron Frankel and take place at Thornlea on the evening of Saturday, May 18, 2024. To support the Center and guarantee a seat at the party as a member of the gala’s Host Committee, please contact the Center’s Director of Development, Amy Klein, at AKlein@cranbrook.edu.
Cranbrook Kitchen Sink 