Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990) was one of the best-known figures of the post-war music scene. During his lifetime, Bernstein achieved greater notoriety as a charismatic conductor from around 1960 onwards, although nowadays he is more famous as a composer. His music for “West Side Story” dating from 1957 has become especially ubiquitous in a variety of versions and innumerable arrangements, but his two so differing roles as composer and conductor created an underlying conflict in Bernstein’s life which he was never able to resolve and was indeed probably insoluble.

Bernstein was born on 25 August 1918 as the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. He studied music at Harvard from 1935 to 1939 where his teachers included figures such as Walter Piston. This was also where Bernstein first encountered the composer Aaron Copland, twenty years his senior, in 1937; the two swiftly became friends and Copland remained one of Bernstein’s major mentors and supporters. Bernstein followed up his studies in Harvard with a study course in conducting with Fritz Reiner and Sergei Koussevitzky.

Bernstein’s life took an unexpected turn on 14 November 1943 when he took over at short notice for Bruno Waltzer in a concert with the New York Philharmonic and became a national hero literally overnight. This was the beginning of an unstoppable career transforming him into one of the most sought-after conductors across the world. His appointment as chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1958 was indeed one of the prime factors which forced Bernstein to neglect composing in favour of his conducting career.

Prior to this appointment, Bernstein had additionally attracted attention as a composer, achieving a respectable success on Broadway with the musical “On the Town” in 1944. In January of the same year, the premiere of his Symphony No. 1 based on the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah had also been successful. The juxtaposition of these two works captures the broad spectrum of his compositions. Bernstein was able to create works influenced by jazz possessing a simple and popular accessibility alongside more serious compositions, frequently with an underlying ideological motivation, which were oriented to the concert music canon. It was significant that he did not view these two categories as irreconcilable opposites, but oscillated freely between the two stylistic poles. His compositions from this period were rounded off by the Symphony No. 2 “The Age of Anxiety” (1948/49) in which the stylistic continuum was particularly evident in exemplary fashion.

Bernstein was also a gifted educator. Beginning in 1954, he communicated with an audience of millions to explain classical music in television productions, setting standards which still remain valid today. Exhausted by his excessive mode of life, Bernstein died on 14 October 1990.