By Jamie Bernstein - Opera News
May 2015
What made it all so difficult for my brother, sister and me was that blurry, blurry line between work of art and life.
A Quiet Place came as a sequel of sorts to my father Leonard Bernstein’s 1951 opera, Trouble in Tahiti. T in T, as we call it, was my father’s processing of his own parents’ unhappy marriage. By the time I was old enough to notice, my grandparents seemed to me like a pretty mellow elderly couple. But my father had recounted growing up in an atmosphere of dinner-table acrimony, squabbles over money, icy silences. The names of the T in T couple were originally Sam and Jennie — his parents’ names. Later, he changed Jennie to Dinah — his grandmother’s name. I wonder what his parents thought of T in T; no record exists of their reaction.
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