- Person
- Leonard Bernstein
- Lived
- 1918–1990
- Field
- Music
- From
- American
The story
Gustav Mahler, born to Jewish parents in Bohemia in 1860, was one of the leading conductors of his age and directed the Vienna Court Opera for a decade. His own symphonies, vast and intensely emotional, had a harder road. After his death in 1911 they were performed less often, and during the Nazi era his music was banned as 'degenerate' in much of Europe. By the 1950s a revival had begun, led by conductors such as Dimitri Mitropoulos and John Barbirolli and helped by the arrival of the long-playing record, but Mahler was still far from the centre of the repertoire.
Leonard Bernstein felt a deep personal connection to Mahler, the composer whose music interested him most. He identified with Mahler as a fellow conductor-composer, once describing the feeling as being like two different men locked in the same body. In 1960, the centenary of Mahler's birth, Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic marked the anniversary with a series of performances, some of whose rehearsals were attended by the composer's widow, Alma. That year he made his first commercial Mahler recording, of the Fourth Symphony, and over the next seven years he recorded the complete cycle, with the Eighth recorded in London. The combination of concerts, television talks and recordings led to a surge of interest in Mahler, especially in the United States.
From 1966 Bernstein also worked closely with the Vienna Philharmonic, the orchestra Mahler himself had once led. He was largely responsible for restoring Mahler to its core repertoire and recorded the symphonies with it many times, later adding performances with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and the Berlin Philharmonic. He made a documentary about the composer, The Little Drummer Boy.
Bernstein also turned to Mahler at moments of public grief. The day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, he conducted a nationally televised performance of the Resurrection Symphony, and in 1968 he conducted the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony at the funeral of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. When Bernstein died in 1990, he was buried with a copy of the score of Mahler's Fifth lying across his heart.
Today Mahler is one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a change in which Bernstein played a decisive part.
Why it matters
Bernstein helped restore a major Jewish composer, once banned by the Nazis, to the heart of musical life worldwide.
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.
- 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.
- Leonard Bernstein led a Journey for Peace to HiroshimaIn 1985 Leonard Bernstein took the European Community Youth Orchestra on a Journey for Peace tour, performing at the Hiroshima Peace Ceremony on the 40th anniversary of the bombing.
Sources
- Leonard Bernstein Wikipedia
- Gustav Mahler Wikipedia
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.