- Person
- Leonard Bernstein
- Lived
- 1918–1990
- Field
- Music
- From
- American
The story
Leonard Bernstein was a committed and outspoken supporter of nuclear disarmament. On 30 May 1980, in a commencement speech at Johns Hopkins University, he warned graduates about the spread of nuclear weapons. He described the generation before them as the first in history born into the age of the bomb, called the stockpiling of missiles obscene, and urged the students to use their imagination to show that war itself was obsolete. In 1983 he dedicated the events surrounding his 65th birthday to the cause of disarmament.
In 1985 he went further. He took the European Community Youth Orchestra, founded in 1976 to bring together talented young musicians from across the member states, on a tour he called the Journey for Peace, travelling through Europe and to Japan. The idea for a Hiroshima concert came from Mitsunori Sano, a young Japanese man who believed Bernstein was the ideal conductor for such an occasion, and Bernstein fitted it into the tour.
On 6 August 1985, the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing, the orchestra performed in Hiroshima as part of the city's commemoration. Every year on that date Hiroshima holds a Peace Memorial Ceremony to console the victims and pray for lasting world peace, with a minute of silence at 8.15 in the morning, the moment the bomb fell. The main work at Bernstein's concert was his own Symphony No. 3, Kaddish, named after the Jewish prayer recited for the dead, which he had dedicated to the memory of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
For Bernstein, music was a way to answer violence. In the week after Kennedy's assassination he had declared that musicians should respond to violence by making music more intensely, more beautifully and more devotedly than ever before. The Hiroshima concert put that belief into practice on a world stage: a Jewish American composer leading young Europeans in a prayer for the dead in the city that had suffered the first atomic attack.
Bernstein continued to work for peace and understanding for the rest of his life, and his final years brought him back to Japan, where in 1990 he founded the Pacific Music Festival for young musicians in Sapporo.
Why it matters
The tour used the voices of young musicians to promote peace and remembrance at one of the most symbolic sites of the nuclear age.
About Leonard Bernstein
Conductor & composer; "West Side Story," New York Philharmonic, music educator to a generation through the Young People's Concerts.
More about Leonard Bernstein
- Leonard Bernstein turned a prize into a school programmeWhen Leonard Bernstein won Japan's Praemium Imperiale in 1990, he used the 100,000 dollar prize to start an arts-in-education project that became the Artful Learning programme.
- Leonard Bernstein taught classical music to millions on TVLeonard Bernstein, the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic, wrote and hosted 53 televised Young People's Concerts, shown in more than 40 countries.
- Leonard Bernstein brought Mahler's symphonies back to lifeLeonard Bernstein was a critical figure in the modern revival of Gustav Mahler, recording his symphonies and helping make them central to the orchestral repertoire.
- Bernstein's Harvard lectures linked music and languageIn 1973 Leonard Bernstein gave six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, The Unanswered Question, applying ideas from linguistics to explain how music communicates.
- Bernstein's Ode to Freedom marked the Berlin Wall's fallOn Christmas Day 1989 Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven's Ninth in East Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Wall, changing the word joy to freedom for an audience of about 100 million.
- Leonard Bernstein founded the Pacific Music Festival in 1990In his final summer, 1990, Leonard Bernstein founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, which has since trained more than 3,200 young musicians.
- Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story reinvented the musicalLeonard Bernstein's score for West Side Story, which opened on Broadway in 1957, fused jazz, Latin rhythms and symphonic technique and is still performed around the world.
- Bernstein's Young People's Concerts taught millions musicFrom 1958 to 1972 Leonard Bernstein presented 53 televised Young People's Concerts, often called the most influential music education series ever produced for television.
- Leonard Bernstein conducted to support Amnesty InternationalLeonard Bernstein gave benefit concerts for Amnesty International in Munich in 1976 and Berlin in 1979, and set up a fund in his wife's name to aid human rights activists.
- Leonard Bernstein was an early champion of AIDS researchLeonard Bernstein took part in one of the earliest AIDS fundraisers in 1983 and later helped raise the first million dollars for amfAR's community-based clinical trials.
Sources
- Leonard Bernstein Wikipedia
- Leonard Bernstein: Humanitarian Leonard Bernstein Office
- Five fascinating facts about Leonard Bernstein and Japan Oxford University Press blog
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.