Seeing the celebrated conductor at work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Bernstein became fixated upon the art of conducting, and decided to shift his intention from a career at the keyboard to one at the podium. It appeared that Bernstein was destined for a career as a concert pianist, when a chance encounter in 1937 with the Greek-born maestro Dimitri Mitropoulos, which led to a brief homosexual relationship, changed the course of his career. If he had a role model at the time, it was the pianist/composer George Gershwin, whose work - mixing classical and jazz influences freely - prefigured much of what Bernstein wanted to do with music. He attended Harvard, and became very well known at the university for his prodigious musical abilities - surprisingly, he often neglected courses in music theory in favor of classes in philosophy and language, all the while playing the piano at every opportunity and writing about music as well. After initial study with Helen Coates, who subsequently became his mentor and personal secretary, he studied with the prominent piano teacher Heinrich Gebhard. He had an equal aptitude with popular music and the classics, and was a formidable improviser even at this young age.īernstein's formal music training began astonishingly late, at age 14, by which time he was already immersed in the beginnings of a musical career. A Boston Pops concert that he attended also contributed mightily to Bernstein's youthful musical aspirations, and during his teens he began staging operas, composing, and playing the piano on a radio show that was sponsored by his father's cosmetics company. Bernstein seemed destined for a career in business until age ten, when he began playing the piano on his own and got good enough to give lessons to other children, earning enough money to pay for his own lessons when his father refused to indulge in such impractical activities. Pepper album for the first time - in those years, like no one before or since, Bernstein made classical music exciting, even sexy he made it sing to people who'd never appreciated it before and speak to people who'd never understood it.īernstein was born in Lawrence, MA, in 1918, the son of Sam Bernstein, a Russian-born Talmudic scholar-turned-fish-cleaner-turned-businessman. And most who were around to see him in the years when he was at the New York Philharmonic, either as an assistant conductor or a guest conductor for such events as the Lewisohn Stadium concerts, or as Music Director, remember him as vividly as they recall Elvis Presley or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or hearing the Sgt. In the process, he opened new musical horizons to millions of listeners and thousands of would-be performers who might never have otherwise discovered them.
A flamboyant public figure, he burst three different times on the musical world - twice in classical with a rush of success on Broadway in between - in a blaze of glory, in the space of 15 years and over a career lasting from the early '40s until the beginning of the '90s, he never lost an opportunity to advance his reputation as well as the cause of music. For more than 30 years, from his assumption of the post of Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958 until the final concerts that he conducted in obviously failing health near the end of his life in 1990, he was the most prominent and widely recognized American-born conductor in the world, and the dominant personality in American classical music as both a conductor and, to a lesser degree, a composer. No figure in 20th century American classical music had as prominent or controversial a career - or did more to sell classical music to the general public as something genuinely exciting, and worth getting into a sweat over - than Leonard Bernstein.
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