The Top 75 Conductors #9: Leonard Bernstein

With my favorite Bernstein recordings

The Top 75 Conductors Series

#9: Leonard Bernstein

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We arrive at #9 and in this slot is the multi-talented, charismatic, and legendary American conductor Leonard Bernstein. One of the most important conductors of all-time, and the first American-born conductor to win widespread acclaim internationally, Bernstein left an indelible mark on the American music scene and on classical music as a whole.

Leonard Bernstein (1918 - 1990)

To be perfectly honest, I have been dreading this post. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Leonard Bernstein and he is among my favorite conductors. But profiling his conducting career is daunting because it is a rather massive task to cover adequately in a relatively short post.

Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918 and died in New York City in 1990. He was born to Jewish parents who both emigrated to the United States from the Russian empire. Apparently, his grandmother insisted that he be named Louis, although his parents always called him Leonard and Bernstein himself legally changed his name to Leonard when he was 16. However, to friends he was always “Lenny”. Eventually the family moved to Boston, where Bernstein attended the Boston Latin School, and the family settled in Newton, Massachusetts when he was 15. Bernstein’s father Samuel became wealthy by owning the distribution rights to the Permanent Wave Hair Machine which was popular in the 1920s and 1930s.

When Bernstein was 10, his aunt Clara brought her upright piano to Samuel’s house, and the boy asked for piano lessons. He picked it up quickly, and began to explore a wide range of music. Legend has it that the young Bernstein organized family and neighborhood productions of musicals and operas, with Bernstein always enthusiastically rounding up people for the performances. His father Samuel was less than pleased with the idea of Leonard pursuing a musical career, but the young man persevered by even finding enterprising ways to pay for his own piano lessons. His father eventually came around, agreeing to take his teenage son to see the Boston Pops play under Arthur Fiedler. This was formative for the young man, especially hearing Ravel’s Bolero for the first time, which left a huge impression on him.

Bernstein attended Harvard University, enrolling in 1935 and studying music under Walter Piston and Edward Burlingame Hill, and he would soon begin doing some composing. But Bernstein’s interests spilled into other areas as well, such as sociology and philosophy. Bernstein would be influenced by the interdisciplinary nature of the arts, and he espoused many of these ideas in his later books and educational programs. During those years, Bernstein would meet composer Marc Blitzstein who would become a mentor, as well as conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. In fact, it was the influence of Mitropoulos, more than anyone else, that propelled Bernstein toward a conducting career. In 1937 Bernstein met Aaron Copland at a recital, and Copland invited him to a party after which Bernstein proceeded to play Copland’s fiendishly difficult Piano Variations. The two became good friends, and Bernstein would later say Copland was his only real composition teacher, even though Copland never formally taught Bernstein.

After graduating from Harvard, Bernstein attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where he studied conducting under the great Fritz Reiner, with Reiner claiming that Bernstein was the only student he ever gave an A. While Bernstein also studied counterpoint, orchestration, and piano, from this point on we will mostly focus on his conducting. In 1940, Bernstein attended the Tanglewood Music Center (then called the Berkshire Music Center), summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he would begin conducting studies under the BSO’s music director Serge Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky would have a profound and lasting impact on Bernstein, and Bernstein would later become his assistant at Tanglewood. Tanglewood itself would form a large part of Bernstein’s life, as he returned nearly every summer for the rest of his life to teach music students.

After Curtis, Bernstein moved to New York City and supported himself by teaching piano lessons and coaching singers. After a time working transcribing jazz and pop music, Bernstein would become friends with Adolph Green and Betty Comden and he played piano with them at local jazz clubs as part of the group called The Revuers. They would become lifelong friends.

But Bernstein’s big break came when, in 1943, he was appointed Artur Rodziński’s assistant at the New York Philharmonic. On November 14th, guest conductor Bruno Walter fell ill, and Bernstein stepped in on short notice and without rehearsal to conduct the program which consisted of music by Schumann, Rózsa, Wagner, and Strauss. The next day the story was all over the newspapers and radio about how this great American success story had unfolded and how Bernstein had scored a huge triumph at Carnegie Hall by taking over at the last moment. Bernstein became famous almost overnight, and subsequently was invited to guest conduct all over the country, along with frequently performing concertos and conducting from the keyboard.