Leonard Bernstein’s Israeli love story

The debate about whether actor Bradley Cooper should have worn a prosthetic nose to portray Leonard Bernstein will roll on  until the film Maestro premieres in November. In the wake of this discussion details about the composer’s complex personal history as a gay man who was also married with children are being revealed, including the fact that the love of Bernstein’s  life was an Israeli soldier. Temporarily distracting the Jewish anti-nose lobby, Azaria Rapoport was assigned as Bernstein’s guide when he visited Israel in November 1948 during the War of Independence.

Both men were the son of immigrants, Bernstein’s parents  from Rivne (now in Ukraine), while Rapoport’s hailed from Poland and came to   Palestine in 1919, where Azaria was born in Tel Aviv and as a teenager studied at Zvi Friedland ‘s acting studio . Enlisting in the British Army in  1942 on release he studied journalism, eventually writing for Haaretz newspaper.  He did not meet Bernstein until 1948, by which point the composer was already deeply affected by the struggle of the Jews in Palestine, having witnessed on an  earlier visit in 1947, after which he wrote a letter to the Russian conductor Serge  Koussevitzky, saying: “There is a strength and devotion in these people that is formidable. They will never let the land be taken from them; they will all die first. And the country is beautiful beyond description.

Bernstein wrote to Koussevitzky again in October 1948, saying he  planned to spend more time in Israel, because : “I  am needed,” but he had also met Azaria Rapoport whom he later described as someone who encapsulated “all the things I’ve wanted rolled into one.”  “It’s a hell of an experience,” said the composer. “Nerve-racking and guts-tearing and wonderful. It’s changed everything.”

Rapoport who went on to become an actor in Israel, appearing in small  films from 1950 until his last, Things (Devarim) in 1990. Travelling with Bernstein over 60 days and doing 40 concerts, the former soldier accompanied the composer  to Beersheva in the Negev, which had been captured by the army who remained there, despite the UN ordering a withdrawal.

The arrival at the encampment of Leonard Bernstein with  the Israel Philharmonic was unexpected, but essential to the composer who performed Mozart’s K. 450 in B flat, Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue on a makeshift stage in front of soldiers, many of them wounded  and transported by ambulance.

The size of the assembled crowd – estimated at one to five thousand – was enough for the Egyptians to assume there was to be an attack on the Negev, so they redeployed their planes there, away from Jerusalem. That the concert served to distract the enemy was momentous enough for Chaim Weizmann, who later became President to say:”Who would take time in war to listen to a Mozart concerto?

Bernstein married Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre three years later, though he along with Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim were known as the four gay Jewish men who collaborated to create West Side Story. The composer left his wife in 1976 to live with his lover Tom Cothran, but returned to his wife when she was diagnosed with lung cancer and stayed with her until she died. Azaria Rapaport died in 1997 aged 73 and Bernstein died seven years earlier aged 72. Their story is unlikely to be featured in Maestro, but it is not one either of the men will have forgotten.