Leonard Bernstein
From Philosopedia
Bernstein, Leonard (25 August 1918 - 14 October 1990)
Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to businessman Sam Bernstein (who died in 1969) and Jennie Resnick Bernstein (who died in 1992), Bernstein was one of the 20th century's most influential musicians.
He was raised in Boston, attending both the Garrison and Boston Latin schools. Although his first training was on the piano, his middle-class parents opposed his choosing a career in music, finding it frequently unrewarding.
While attending Harvard, he conducted some incidental music he had composed for Aristophanes's The Birds. At the Curtis Institute of Music, he studied piano, conducting, and orchestration. He also attended the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Tanglewood Institute. When 25, he landed an assistant conductor's position with The New York Philharmonic. When he was a last-minute replacement for a Carnegie Hall performance, he became noted in musical circles.
In 1944 the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performed his Symphony No. 1: Jeremiah. Also that year his Fancy Free, in a collaboration with choreographer Jerome Robbins, led to its being adapted into a Broadway musical, On The Town.
In 1945 and 1946, he became music director of the New York City Symphony Orchestra and conducted events in Milan and Tel Aviv as well as taught at Tanglewood and Brandeis University.
In 1951 he married Felicia Montealegre Cohn (a Chilean actress who died in 1978) - their children were Jamie Anne Maria (born 1952), Alexander Serge Leonard (born 1955), and Nina Maria Felicia (born 1962).
In 1956, Bernstein landed a contract with the Columbia Masterworks label, moving to Deutsche Grammophon in the 1970s.
In 1958 and for eleven years, he was director of the New York Philharmonic, during which he created Young People's Concerts, a series broadcast on Columbia Broadcasting System that lasted for fourteen seasons.
Bernstein wrote “Mass” (1971), which he described as “a theater piece for singers, dancers, and players” and was performed at the opening of the John F. Kennedy Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. In the work, he argues melodramatically with God in his “Kaddish” symphony and mass and features his uncloseted bisexuality in the opera, “A Quiet Place.”
Bernstein wrote The Joy of Music (1959) and "'The Infinite Variety of Music (1966). He wrote the plays On the Town” (1944), Wonderful Town (1953), Candide (1956); and West Side Story (1956).
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The Black Panther Party
In 1970, the Bernsteins held a party at their Park Avenue duplex to raise money for the Black Panthers, an African-American radical organization that promoted Black Power and self-defense through acts of social agitation. Tom Wolfe wrote about the party in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. The New Yorker author attended:
- I just thought it was a scream, because it was so illogical by all ordinary thinking. To think that somebody living in an absolutely stunning duplex on Park Avenue could be having in all these guys who were saying, "We will take everything away from you if we get the chance," which is what their program spelled out, was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed.
Wolfe describes how the Bernsteins substituted white South Americans, rather than their usual black butler and maid, to serve the party. Journalists exasperated Bernstein by their interest in what was described as a party celebrating white guilt and armchair agitation as becoming facets of high fashion.
Private Life
He also is known for his various love affairs, the homosexual ones of which are described in Charles Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis 1940—1996 (1997). In 1976, after having been married for twenty-five years to the Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre and brought up three children with her, he left his wife for a young man. “The darker the color, the better,” one Broadway star reported. According to Boston Phoenix writer Douglass Shand-Tucci, there was an affair with conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos and with Aaron Copland as well as one starting in 1973 with Tom Cothran of Radio KKHI-FM in Denver - Cothran died of AIDS.
Humanitarian Concerns
In his later years, his works included humanitarian concerns. On the 40th anniversary of the atom bomb in 1985, he staged the Journey for Peace - the European Community Youth Orchestra toured and performed it in Athens and Hiroshima. In 1987 he established a fund in memory of his wife Felicia Montealegre to benefit Amnesty International, which she had been a long-standing supporter. He staged and conducted a series during the dismantling of the Berlin Wall at the close of 1989, featuring musicians from all the nations that were associated with the original partitioning.
Although nominally Jewish — David Denby has thoroughly outlined his musical connections with Judaism — Bernstein accepted a Humanist of the Year award from the American Humanist Association. The award was to have been given in 1990, the year of his death.
Death
His final performance as a conductor was on 19 August 1990 at Tanglewood. During the Boston Symphony's playing Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, he suffered a coughing fit, almost causing the concert to stop. Later, it was issued on a CD by Deutsche Grammophon.
He died of pneumonia and a pleural tumor five days after retiring. From his mid-50s, a longtime heavy smoker, he had battled emphysema.
During his funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan, as shown in a PBS American Masters documentary, construction workers waved and removed their hats, yelling "Goodbye Lenny."
Bernstein is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
{CE; David Denby, “The Trouble With Lenny,” The New Yorker, 17 August 1998}
