A son of immigrants in Massachusetts
Leonard Bernstein was born on 25 August 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and registered at birth as Louis, a name he soon set aside in favour of the one his family always used. His parents, Samuel and Jennie Bernstein, were Jewish immigrants from the region of present-day Ukraine, and his father had built up a modest business supplying beauty parlours. Samuel hoped his son would join the family trade and was at first deeply sceptical of a musical career, fearing it promised only poverty. Music nonetheless seized the boy early. When Bernstein was about ten an aunt left an upright piano at the family home, and he began to teach himself with an intensity that startled everyone around him. He grew up partly in Boston, attended the demanding Boston Latin School, and immersed himself in the city's concert life, already certain, against his father's wishes, of where his future lay.
Harvard, Curtis and Tanglewood
Bernstein studied music at Harvard University, graduating in 1939, where he absorbed not only composition and theory but a wide literary and philosophical culture that would later make him such a natural communicator. He continued at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, studying conducting with Fritz Reiner and piano with Isabelle Vengerova. The most formative encounter came at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, the summer academy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he became a devoted pupil of the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky recognised an exceptional gift and treated Bernstein almost as a son, instilling in him a near-spiritual sense of the conductor's responsibility. These years were not financially easy, and Bernstein supported himself in part through teaching and freelance work, but they equipped him with formidable technique and the conviction, learned from his mentors, that serious music belonged to everyone, not to a privileged few.
The legendary debut
Bernstein's life changed in a single afternoon. In 1943 he was appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, a respectable but largely backstage post. On 14 November that year the guest conductor Bruno Walter fell ill with influenza, and Bernstein, then twenty-five, was called upon to lead a nationally broadcast concert at Carnegie Hall with no rehearsal. The programme was demanding, including works by Schumann and Strauss, yet he conducted it with such command and exhilaration that the audience erupted. The New York Times reported the event on its front page and praised it in an editorial as a fine American success story. Overnight, an unknown young American had become a celebrity, and the moment carried a particular symbolism: at a time when the great podiums were dominated by European maestros, here was a home-grown talent who could match them. From that day his career as a conductor was assured.
A composer of the stage
Bernstein refused, throughout his life, to choose between conducting and composing, and in the years after his debut he poured himself into the theatre. His ballet Fancy Free, made with the choreographer Jerome Robbins in 1944, was an immediate hit and was swiftly expanded into the Broadway musical On the Town, a buoyant story of sailors on shore leave in wartime New York. Wonderful Town followed in 1953, and in 1956 came Candide, a witty operetta after Voltaire that fared poorly on its first run yet whose sparkling score, especially its overture, would secure a lasting place in the repertoire. Alongside these he wrote concert music, including three symphonies that wrestled openly with faith, doubt and the modern crisis of belief, the second taking its title and shape from W. H. Auden's poem The Age of Anxiety. Bernstein moved between the popular and the symphonic with a freedom that some purists distrusted but that audiences embraced.
West Side Story
In 1957 Bernstein achieved the work for which he is most widely loved. West Side Story, conceived with Jerome Robbins, the playwright Arthur Laurents and the young lyricist Stephen Sondheim, transplanted the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the streets of contemporary New York, reimagining the feuding families as rival gangs and confronting prejudice, immigration and urban violence. Bernstein's score fused jazz, Latin rhythms and the techniques of the concert hall into something genuinely new for the musical theatre, music both immediately tuneful and harmonically daring. The original Broadway production opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on 26 September 1957 and ran for many months, and the 1961 film adaptation carried the work to an enormous worldwide audience. West Side Story expanded what a Broadway musical could attempt, proving that the form could carry serious tragedy and social comment without sacrificing popular appeal, and its songs entered the common musical memory of the century.
Music director of the New York Philharmonic
In 1958 Bernstein was appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic, the first American-born and American-trained conductor to lead the orchestra. He held the post until 1969, and the tenure was extraordinarily productive. He championed American composers, particularly Aaron Copland, and did more than almost anyone to establish the symphonies of Gustav Mahler at the heart of the repertoire, recording them all and arguing passionately for their greatness. He also presided over the orchestra's move to its new home at Lincoln Center. Bernstein was a magnetic, physically uninhibited conductor whose leaping, dancing podium manner divided opinion; admirers found it the visible expression of musical feeling, while detractors thought it self-dramatising. After stepping down he was named the Philharmonic's laureate conductor for life, and he continued to appear with the great orchestras of Europe, building an especially treasured relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic.
The teacher on television
Perhaps Bernstein's most far-reaching gift was as an educator. Beginning in 1958 he presented the New York Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts, televised programmes in which he explained how music worked to vast family audiences, treating children as intelligent listeners rather than talking down to them. The series ran for fourteen seasons and won numerous Emmy awards, and it introduced an entire generation to the inner life of symphonic music. He lectured with the same generosity for adults, drawing on his Harvard learning, and in 1973 delivered the celebrated Norton Lectures at the university, later published and filmed as The Unanswered Question. For Bernstein, explaining music was not a sideline but a moral calling, an extension of his belief that the art belonged to everyone. No figure did more to make classical music feel approachable, exciting and worth understanding to ordinary people who had never thought of themselves as its audience.
Politics, conscience and complication
Bernstein was a public man with strong convictions, and they sometimes drew controversy. He was an outspoken liberal, an early supporter of civil rights, and a critic of the Vietnam War, and a 1970 gathering he and his wife held to raise legal funds for members of the Black Panther Party was savagely mocked in print, the episode caricatured under a now-notorious phrase that pursued him for years. He maintained a lifelong bond with the State of Israel, conducting there from the time of its founding through moments of war and crisis. His private life was complicated: married to the actress Felicia Montealegre, with whom he had three children, he also had relationships with men, and the resulting tensions, including a painful separation before Felicia's death from cancer in 1978, were a source of lasting personal pain. He was a man of large appetites and contradictions, and he did not pretend otherwise.
Final years
Bernstein remained ferociously active into his last decade, composing, conducting, recording and teaching with undiminished energy. He returned again and again to Tanglewood, the place that had formed him, mentoring young musicians and conducting a celebrated gala there for his seventieth birthday in 1988. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, he travelled to the divided city to conduct Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in celebration, famously altering the text so that the chorus sang of freedom. His final concert performance came at Tanglewood in August 1990. Years of heavy smoking had taken their toll, and his health failed quickly thereafter. Leonard Bernstein died in New York on 14 October 1990, at the age of seventy-two, from a heart attack associated with lung disease. He had announced his retirement from conducting only days before, and the musical world mourned a figure who had seemed, for half a century, almost inexhaustible.
Impact and legacy
Leonard Bernstein reshaped musical life on several fronts at once. As a composer he gave the world West Side Story and Candide, works still performed constantly that proved popular theatre could carry genuine ambition and seriousness. As a conductor he rescued Mahler from relative neglect and made his symphonies part of the standard repertoire, and he asserted, simply by his eminence, that American musicians could stand among the finest in the world. But his deepest legacy may be as a teacher. Through the Young People's Concerts and his lectures he opened classical music to millions who had assumed it was not for them, and he trained and inspired generations of young conductors and composers at Tanglewood and beyond. His insistence that art was a humane and democratic force, voiced unforgettably after the assassination of President Kennedy, still guides musicians who believe their work should answer cruelty with beauty. Decades after his death, his recordings, his compositions and his example continue to bring people into the life of music.
Sources & further reading
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A life 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.