Classical music This article is more than 12 years oldObituaryJack Gottlieb obituary
This article is more than 12 years oldComposer, musician and right-hand man to Leonard BernsteinThe American musician Jack Gottlieb, who has died aged 80 of prostate cancer, thought of himself primarily as a composer, and wished to be remembered first for his own music. But it was as assistant to the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein that he made the greatest impact, and, at his last public appearance – at the Library of Congress in Washington – he admitted wryly that Bernstein, who died in 1990, was still part of his DNA. His book Working with Bernstein was published only last year, but is by far the most valuable Bernstein memoir and will surely remain so, both for its candour and its musical insights.
Gottlieb went back a long way with Bernstein. In the 1950s he studied musical comedy with him at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Bernstein's compositional methods in A Study of Melodic Manipulations (1964) – an analysis that has not been bettered. And he compiled a comprehensive catalogue of Bernstein's compositions, music writings, recordings and television features, known as the Red Book.
He edited Bernstein's bestselling television lectures, The Joy of Music and The Infinite Variety of Music. For record companies he wrote sleeve notes, and for concert halls he prepared introductory essays. He remained on the staff of the Leonard Bernstein office, and was its senior member.
Gottlieb was born and grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and as a boy played the clarinet in marching bands. The study of Jewish music became a passion when he attended a summer school, led by the dynamic synagogue composer Max Helfman. "I was still raw and not yet very musically developed," Gottlieb recalled. Helfman gave him a sense of purpose and remained his "spiritual father". He took a music degree at Queens College, New York, and later studied for a master's at the Brandeis campus, where his composition teacher was Irving Fine. Bernstein – then more active as a composer than conductor – taught for a term on musical theatre, using his own Candide, only half written, as his testbed.
Gottlieb fell under the spell of the charismatic Bernstein, 12 years his senior, and became his assistant in 1958 when Bernstein assumed the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic. The job included menial chores such as packing suitcases and dishing out pills, but also offered such rewards as worldwide tours, including a visit to Moscow, where Boris Pasternak and Dmitri Shostakovitch visited Bernstein's dressing room.
Eventually, Gottlieb wearied of the Bernstein merry-go-round and left in 1966 to teach, and for three years to serve as music director of Temple Israel school in St Louis, Missouri. More teaching followed in New York at the Hebrew Union College, where in 1975 he became the first director of the college's school of sacred music. But in 1977 he returned to the Bernstein fold, becoming his director of publications.
In the meantime Gottlieb was amassing a considerable catalogue of compositions with a strong emphasis on music for the synagogue. There was an ecumenical thrust, too. In 1967 his sacred service Love Songs for Sabbath was sung in a Catholic church in St Paul, Minnesota, and a similar impulse in 2000 saw other liturgical music performed at an Episcopalian vespers service at St Bartholomew's, New York City.
Gottlieb described his style as "basically eclectic", and his website reveals substantial activity in many genres, among them Hebrew psalm settings, cabaret, song cycles, secular art songs to English and Hebrew texts, choral works (including Presidential Suite, 1990 – settings of texts of "wisdom and whimsy" by seven US presidents), music for piano and symphony orchestra, three one-act operas and a cluster of chamber works. His love of the Jewish tradition was matched by a passion for show business which led to the publication of a lively and informative book entitled Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood (2004).
Gottlieb was an enormous help to me two decades ago when I was writing a biography of Bernstein. Visits to his West End Avenue apartment were always a joy. He had been ill for some years, but made an enormous effort to attend a talk I was giving late in 2010, primed with anecdotes to enliven the discussion on Bernstein's opera A Quiet Place, about which he had mixed feelings. He had just been named scholar-in-residence by the New York Philharmonic for the coming season.
He instructed that there should be no funeral, but a memorial concert of his music on the first anniversary of his death. He is survived by a sister, Irene Caplan, a nephew and three nieces.
Jack Gottlieb, composer, writer and editor, born 12 October 1930; died 23 February 2011
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