Leonard Bernstein

Samuel Bernstein held the exclusive American rights to the Frederick's Permanent Wave Machine, and he had no intention of financing a musician. His son, registered at birth in Lawrence, Massachusetts, as Louis because a grandmother insisted, was called Leonard at home and made the change legal at 16. The piano arrived by accident when he was 10 — Aunt Clara had nowhere to put her upright and left it at the house. He went through Boston Latin, then Harvard from 1935, taking a music degree cum laude in 1939, then the Curtis Institute, where Fritz Reiner taught him conducting and Koussevitzky took him up at the Berkshire Music Center. He had his conducting diploma in 1941 and no orchestra.

Bruno Walter came down with flu on November 14, 1943. Bernstein, the Philharmonic's 25-year-old assistant, went on with no rehearsal, live on the CBS network, and was on the front page of the New York Times the next morning. Fancy Free and On the Town followed in 1944, Candide in 1956, West Side Story in 1957. He took the New York Philharmonic in 1958, the first American-born conductor to run a major American orchestra, and held it until 1969 while putting the Young People's Concerts on national television — 53 of them by 1972. He wrote the Kaddish Symphony for the murdered Kennedy, the Chichester Psalms, and Mass, which Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had commissioned for the opening of the Kennedy Center.

He married the actress Felicia Montealegre on September 9, 1951, and they had three children. He had affairs with men and with women all his life, and a private letter of hers acknowledged his homosexuality plainly. In 1976 he left to live in California with the musicologist Tom Cothran. When Felicia was found to have lung cancer the next year he came back and nursed her until she died on June 16, 1978. The state exacted a different price. The FBI had watched him since the 1940s and built a file of more than 800 pages, the State Department and CBS briefly blacklisted him in the early 1950s, and after the January 1970 fundraiser he and Felicia held for the Panther 21 legal defense, the Bureau itself wrote the hate mail and planted people among the pickets outside.

Tom Wolfe's cover story on that fundraiser gave the language the phrase radical chic and gave Bernstein a caricature he never shook. He announced his retirement from conducting on October 9, 1990, and was dead five days later at 72, in his apartment at the Dakota, of a heart attack brought on by a pleural tumor — he had smoked heavily and had emphysema from his mid-50s. Construction workers took their hats off and called goodbye as the funeral procession passed. He lies at Green-Wood in Brooklyn with a score of Mahler's Fifth across his chest. Musicians still argue over which Bernstein was the larger, the composer or the conductor, and the conductors he trained kept working long after both.

Leonard Bernstein's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fancy Free other
  The ballet with Jerome Robbins that started everything 1944
• On the Town other
  Fancy Free turned into a Broadway musical the same year 1944
• West Side Story other
  Jazz, Latin rhythm and symphonic writing on a Broadway stage 1957
• Young People's Concerts television
  53 broadcasts through 1972, and an Emmy shelf 1958
• Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers other
  Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for the Kennedy Center 1971
• The Unanswered Question book
  The Harvard Norton Lectures, reading music through Chomsky's linguistics 1973

• 1935 aged ~17 Enters Harvard, against his father's preference
• 1941 aged ~23 Takes a conducting diploma at Curtis under Fritz Reiner
• November 14, 1943 aged 25 Substitutes for Bruno Walter with no rehearsal, on national radio The New York Times put it on the front page.
• September 9, 1951 aged 33 Marries the actress Felicia Montealegre
• 1958 aged ~40 Takes sole charge of the New York Philharmonic The first American-born conductor to lead a major American orchestra.
• January 14, 1970 aged 51 Holds a fundraiser at his apartment for the Panther 21 defense Tom Wolfe's account of it coined the phrase radical chic.
• June 16, 1978 aged 59 Felicia dies of lung cancer with Bernstein nursing her
• December 25, 1989 aged 71 Conducts Beethoven's Ninth in East Berlin with Freiheit for Freude An estimated 100 million people watched.
• October 14, 1990 aged 72 Dies at the Dakota, five days after retiring from the podium

• Aaron Copland 1900–1990
  Composer whose accessible modernist works created an enduring musical language associated with American landscapes and identity. mentor and friend
• Stephen Sondheim 1930–2021
  Composer and lyricist whose formal and psychological innovations transformed the American musical theater. lyricist on West Side Story
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 1929–1994
  First Lady who restored the White House as a museum and shaped the public memory of her husband's presidency. commissioned Mass
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. dedicated the Kaddish Symphony to him
• George Gershwin 1898–1937
  Composer who fused jazz, popular song, Broadway, and concert music into a distinctly American style. predecessor in crossing the concert hall and Broadway