Leonard Bernstein ( BURN-styne; born Louis Bernstein; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian. Considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time, he was the first American-born conductor to receive international acclaim. Bernstein was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history" according to music critic Donal Henahan. Bernstein's honors and accolades include seven Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, and 16 Grammy Awards (including the Lifetime Achievement Award), as well as an Academy Award nomination. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1981.
As a composer, Bernstein wrote in many genres, including symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music, and pieces for the piano. Bernstein's works include the Broadway musical West Side Story, 1957, which continues to be regularly performed worldwide, and has been adapted into two (1961 and 2021) feature films, as well as three symphonies, Serenade (after Plato's Symposium) (1954) and Chichester Psalms (1965), the original score for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), and theater works including On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953), Candide (1956), and his Mass (1971).
Bernstein was the first American-born conductor to lead a major American symphony orchestra. He was music director of the New York Philharmonic and conducted the world's major orchestras, generating a legacy of audio and video recordings. Bernstein was also a critical figure in the modern revival of the music of Gustav Mahler, in whose music he was most interested. A skilled pianist, Bernstein often conducted piano concertos from the keyboard. He shared and explored classical music on television with a mass audience in national and international broadcasts, including Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic.
Bernstein worked in support of civil rights; protested against the Vietnam War; advocated nuclear disarmament; raised money for HIV/AIDS research and awareness; championed Janis Ian at age 15 and her song about interracial love, "Society's Child", on his CBS television show; and engaged in multiple international initiatives for human rights and world peace. He conducted Mahler's Resurrection Symphony to mark the death of president John F. Kennedy, and in Israel at a concert, Hatikvah on Mt. Scopus, after the Six-Day War. The sequence of events was recorded for a documentary entitled Journey to Jerusalem. On Christmas Day, 1989, Bernstein conducted a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Less than a year later, in October 1990, he died of a heart attack in New York, aged 72.
1918–1935: Early life and family
Leonard Bernstein was born on August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was of Jewish descent. His mother, Jennie (née Resnick), and his father, Samuel Joseph Bernstein, were both immigrants to the United States.
His father came from Rovensky Uyezd in the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). Samuel was born in 1892 in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish shtetl and wanted to become a rabbi, but after he was called up for military service, he left Russia for the United States in 1908 and initially worked at the Fulton Fish Market in New York City. Jennie was born in Russia in 1898 and arrived in the United States in 1905; she later worked at the woolen mills in Lawrence.
His grandmother insisted that his first name officially be Louis, but his parents always called him Leonard. He legally changed his name to Leonard when he was 16. To his friends and many others, he was simply known as "Lenny".
His mother had moved in with her parents, in Lawrence, toward the end of her pregnancy with Leonard, her first child. Since he was sickly as an infant, he stayed there until he was strong enough for him and his mother to join his father in Boston. There, the boy attended the William Lloyd Garrison School and then the Boston Latin School, where he and classmate Lawrence F. Ebb wrote the class song. When Leonard was 15, the family moved to nearby Newton, Massachusetts.
Samuel became a wealthy man as the owner of the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company, which, in the 1920s and 1930s, held the exclusive distribution rights for the Frederick's Permanent Wave Machine.
In Leonard's early years, his main exposure to music was on Friday nights at Congregation Mishkan Tefila in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. Its innovative rabbi, Herman H. Rubenovitz, introduced organ music and a mixed choir to New England's Jewish congregations. He also recruited a distinguished European cantor, Izso Glickstein, whom Leonard described as his favorite cantor. Glickstein was Burton Bernstein's godfather. Burton described Glickstein as a cantor who could have been an opera singer.
When Bernstein was 10 years old, his Aunt Clara, Samuel's sister, deposited her upright piano at their house. Young Bernstein asked for lessons and subsequently studied with a variety of piano teachers, including Helen Coates, who would later become his secretary. In the summers, the Bernstein family would retreat to their vacation home in Sharon, Massachusetts, where Leonard conscripted all the neighborhood children to put on shows, ranging from Bizet's Carmen to Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. He and his two younger siblings, Shirley and Burton, remained close their entire lives.
Samuel initially opposed Leonard's interest in music and attempted to discourage it by refusing to pay for his son's piano lessons. So, Leonard took to giving lessons to young people in his neighborhood. One of his students, Sid Ramin, would become a beloved lifelong friend and Bernstein's orchestrator (along with Irwin Kostal) for West Side Story.
Eventually, Samuel came around, taking his son to orchestral concerts in his teenage years and ultimately supporting his music studies, as well. In May 1932, Leonard attended his first orchestral concert with the Boston Pops, conducted by Arthur Fiedler. There, Bernstein first heard Ravel's Boléro, which impressed him greatly.
On March 30, 1932, Bernstein played Brahms's Rhapsody in G minor at his first public piano performance in Susan Williams's studio recital at the New England Conservatory of Music. Two years later, he made his debut as a soloist with an orchestra, playing Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor with the Boston Public School Orchestra.
Among his strong musical influences was George Gershwin. When news came of Gershwin's death, in July 1937, Bernstein, then a music counselor at a summer camp, interrupted lunch in the mess hall and played Gershwin's second Prelude as a memorial.
In 1935, Bernstein enrolled at Harvard College, where he studied music with, among others, composers Edward Burlingame Hill and Walter Piston. Bernstein's first extant composition, Psalm 148, for voice and piano, is dated 1935. He majored in music with a senior thesis titled "The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music" (1939; reproduced in his book Findings). One of Bernstein's intellectual influences at Harvard was aesthetics professor David Prall, and one of his friends at the school was future philosopher Donald Davidson. Bernstein wrote and conducted the musical score for Davidson's production of the Aristophanes play The Birds, performed in the original Greek. Bernstein recycled some of this music in future works. While a student, Bernstein composed for the Harvard Glee Club and was briefly its president while also serving as the unpaid pianist for Harvard Film Society's silent film presentations.
Bernstein mounted a student production of The Cradle Will Rock, directing its action from the piano as the composer Marc Blitzstein had done at the premiere. Blitzstein, who attended the performance, subsequently became a close friend and mentor to Bernstein. As a sophomore at Harvard, Bernstein met the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was an influence on Bernstein's eventual decision to become a conductor. Mitropoulos invited Bernstein to come to Minneapolis for the 1940–41 season to be his assistant, but the plan fell through because of union issues. In 1937, Bernstein sat next to Aaron Copland at a dance recital at Town Hall in New York City. Copland invited Bernstein to his birthday party afterwards, where Bernstein impressed the guests by playing Copland's challenging Piano Variations. Although he was never a formal student of Copland's, Bernstein regularly sought his advice, often citing him as "the closest thing to a composition teacher [Bernstein] ever had." Bernstein graduated from Harvard in 1939 with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude.