Last Call: Bernstein and von Karajan Didn’t Have To Be Portrayed by Women, Just More of the Conductors Themselves Would Have Been Enough

May 11, 2025 by Two Sues On the Aisle

By Two Sues on the Aisle, Susie Rosenbluth and Sue Weston. [Updated May 10]

Staged imaginary meetings between historic personalities are nothing new. Just as Friedrich Schiller’s verse play, Mary Suart, about an historically fictious rendezvous between Queen Elizabeth I and her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, shortly before the former condemned the latter to death, has long intrigued those fascinated by Tudoriana, Peter Danish’s Last Call, a new play, running at Manhattan’s New World Stages through May 4, should have tickled the fancy of classical music lovers, historians, and students of popular culture. Last Call envisions what might have happened if two legendary conductors, the American-Jewish Leonard Bernstein and the Austrian former Nazi Party member, Herbert von Karajan, accidently crossed paths in 1988 in Vienna’s iconic Sacher hotel. The hypothetical meeting is set in 1988, one year before von Karajan’s death and two years before Bernstein’s.

Helen Schneider as Bernstein and Lucca Züchner as von Karajan

In real life, the two were fierce rivals, not only musically but also culturally and politically. Although, according to all reports, they respected each other, von Karajan was known as a perfectionist, more concerned with exquisite sound and exact tempi than with the flair and flamboyance taken to an art form by Bernstein.

The discussions Mr. Danish puts in these two virtuosi’s mouths should captivate the audience, whether or not they know the individual pieces they place under the microscope. Take, for example, their give and take on how to conduct Brahms’ Symphony No. 1. Von Karajan’s interpretation was always beautiful if studied and somewhat devoid of emotion; Bernstein’s, on the other hand, had nothing to do with convention. The quintessence of passion, Bernstein was never satisfied with just reproducing the ordinary. His expressiveness included taking all sorts of liberties, but it drove the orchestra to richness, textural complexity, and revelations of detail. Von Karajan was always more detached and less extreme.

Von Karajan stuck to the classics; Bernstein—much to the Austrian’s dismay—reached out, embracing as a composer the popular idiom of Broadway and as a teacher to the medium of television.

To his credit, Mr. Danish includes the most controversial element of von Karajan’s life, his enrollment in the Nazi Party in 1933 and acquiescence to Nazi leaders who, throughout World War II, used him to promote the Third Reich through German music. From 1933-1945, he usually opened his concerts with the Nazis Party anthem, the Horst Wessel-Lied. After the war, he insisted he had joined the party “for career reasons” and his “denazification tribunal,” the Allies’ effort to remove Nazis from positions of power, exonerated him of illegal activity during the Nazi period.

Nevertheless, for many, he would forever be called “SS Colonel von Karajan.”

Was Bernstein one of those who remembered him as such? Mr. French doesn’t make it clear. When he has Bernstein mention that von Karajan’s “assistant” was a Nazi, the Austrian conductor rejoins that it took the American “a record-breaking 20 minutes to bring that subject up.” In the play, Von Karajan goes on to recall the historically true fact that, after the war, his 1955 Carnegie Hall debut erupted in public protest against his Nazi past. In the play, he intimates that Bernstein had a hand—if not the lead—in orchestrating the demonstration.

There doesn’t seem to be any historical evidence to that effect, but Bernstein, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, not only never denied his Jewishness, he reveled in it. Although many of his admirers—more than a few of them Jews—exhorted him to change his name to something less blatantly Jewish, he refused. He is famously quoted as saying, “I’ll do it as Bernstein or not at all.”

Ineligible to serve in the military during World War II because of asthma, he went to Germany in 1948 to conduct a group that called itself the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra, more than a dozen Holocaust survivors who organized themselves into an ensemble at a displaced-persons camp.

The first of his many trips to Israel was in 1945. He went back during the Israeli War of Independence, telling anyone who would listen that the best thing about performing in Israel was the “special concerts for soldiers. Never could you imagine so intelligent and cultured and music-loving an army!”

In November 1948, an armed bus carried Bernstein and the 35 members of the Israel Philharmonic to perform for troops in Beersheba, who had remained camped out in the town despite the UN’s order to withdraw its troops. He conducted the Israel Philharmonic for more than 25 seasons.

Bernstein’s connection to Israel and Jewish themes in his music lasted throughout his life.

Why Mr. French left that part of Bernstein’s history out of this imagined discussion with a former member of the Nazi party is anyone’s guess.

Last Call

In fact, if Mr. French had trusted his subjects and their material more, Last Call might be a work that attracts music students, their teachers, and enthusiasts in droves, but the playwright insisted on a distraction: The roles of both conductors were taken by women. Fine actresses—Helen Schneider as Bernstein and Lucca Züchner as von Karajan—they may be, but whether on purpose or not, they never reached the point of allowing the audience to forget they were women pretending to be men.

The third character in the play, Victor Peterson, portrays the waiter who delightedly brings the conductors tea, liquor, and Sacher tortes and then morphs into one of Bernstein’s and von Karajan’s favorite artists, the renowned, magnificent soprano, Maria Callas. Displaying a robust countertenor, Mr. Peterson, dressed in a black gown, delivers a surprisingly good performance of “Il Dolce Suono,” the so-called “mad scene” from Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti.

Was Mr. French trying to stress that both men, despite their marriages to women, were gay? Was he referencing that Callas, whose standing as a “gay icon”—a public figure regarded as a cultural luminary by members of the LGBTQ+ community—is indisputable, while neither Bernstein nor von Karajan has achieved that status?

In his notes, Mr. French says he was trying to introduce another quality to the performance. He calls his play “an impressionist fantasy.”

Given its characters and their lasting contribution to classical music, Last Call has possibilities much deeper than that.

Two Sues on the Aisle bases its ratings on how many challahs (1-5) it pays to buy (rather than make) to see the play, show, film, book, or exhibit being reviewed.

Last Call received 3 Challahs