Biography
Born into a Russian Jewish family in Massachusetts in 1918, Leonard Bernstein showed outstanding musical talent as a pianist from a very early age. At the age of 25 he was working as a trainee conductor for the New York Philharmonic orchestra when he had a stroke of good fortune. On 14 November 1943, a guest conductor, Bruno Walter, was forced to cancel an appearance. With only a few hours' notice, Bernstein substituted for him in a concert at Carnegie Hall, which was broadcast on national radio. The concert was a triumph: Bernstein became a household name and orchestras all over the world wanted him as a guest conductor.
The year before he had completed the first of three symphonies, Jeremiah, which fused Jewish traditional and classical music in an impassioned cry of despair for the Jewish people who were being massacred by the Nazis in Europe.
In 1943, Bernstein collaborated with a talented young choreographer Jerome Robbins, on the ballet Fancy Free, which integrated popular dance styles of the time. The following year this was expanded into a full scale Broadway show, On the Town – Bernstein's first hit musical.
Bernstein was straddling the two warring worlds of popular and classical music, moving from one to the other and, ultimately, combining the two. In 1953 he reached a pinnacle of achievement in classical music: he became the first American to conduct at the La Scala opera house in Milan. That same year, he started work on an opera of his own, Candide, a satire on the McCarthy witch hunts, during which Senator Joe McCarthy accused many high-profile creatives of having communist leanings and engaging in un-American activities. The librettist was Lillian Hellman, who had been blacklisted by McCarthy's committee.
In 1957 he again collaborated with Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and the playwright Arthur Laurents on West Side Story, the landmark musical that was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1961. Widely accepted as a cultural landmark, West Side Story broke the boundary between classical and popular music, creating a new type of musical and setting new standards for upcoming composers.
Bernstein's last symphony, Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead), was completed in 1963 and encapsulated both America's conflicts in Vietnam and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. But in the 1960s, as rock, soul and R&B came to the fore, Bernstein opted to write a Mass. Commissioned by Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy to commemorate John F Kennedy, it was first performed in 1971 at the inauguration of Washington DC's John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Leonard Bernstein continued to work prolifically – conducting, teaching and composing until his death in 1990.
