On 9 July 1967, Leonard Bernstein led the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) in a concert atop Mount Scopus, celebrating in the aftermath of the Jewish State’s geopolitical victory in the Six-Day War. Even as explosions thundered on in the distance, Bernstein publicly championed Jerusalem’s destiny to be a peaceful, unified city in which all could flourish through increased cultural tolerance. This event is perhaps more indicative than any other of the contradictions between Bernstein’s personal and political beliefs as a progressive, first-generation Jewish American and his deeply ingrained, lifelong loyalty to Zionism and Israeli nationalist sensibilities. This chapter briefly explores how these oft-conflicting belief systems and historical events shaped Bernstein’s lifelong struggle to negotiate his identity as an American New Jew.

This chapter describes Bernstein’s education, which prepared him well for his chosen activities. His primary and secondary education took place at William Lloyd Garrison School in Roxbury, MA, and his final six years at the demanding Boston Latin School. Bernstein then attended Harvard College, where he earned an A.B. in Music in 1939. His early life also included two hours of daily Hebrew study at the family’s temple from age eight until his Bar Mitzvah. In addition to his largely academic training in music at Harvard, Bernstein studied piano privately from age ten until his college graduation, and then for two years attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied conducting with Fritz Reiner and piano with Isabelle Vengerova, earning an M.M. His formal study and the many connections that he made while at Harvard and Curtis helped make possible Bernstein’s rapid success as a conductor and composer.

Between October 1955 and March 1958, Bernstein presented seven television broadcasts on the Omnibus culture series. He addressed topics from Beethoven, Bach, modern music, and opera to musical theatre and jazz and appealed widely to audiences, educating and offering knowledge while avoiding excessively elevated language. Writing the scripts himself, Bernstein effortlessly moved from various roles as a conductor, narrator, pianist, and educator within the context of the show, dazzling audiences with his charismatic personality and stylish attire. The programmes were well received, with an estimated sixteen million viewers tuning in to watch the December 1955 ‘The Art of Conducting’ broadcast. His carefully selected words, analogies, and references were extremely relatable to the middle-class family demographics of the programmes, and the broadcasts fostered Bernstein’s growing pop-star status as he gained international popularity as a conductor and both a Broadway and classical composer.

Jewish related works form a significant part of Bernstein’s oeuvre. He draws from Hebrew texts taken from the bible and liturgy and also uses traditional Jewish melodies. Bernstein had a strong Jewish upbringing in his synagogue, Mishkan Tefila in Boston. Throughout his life Jewishness provided an approach to express his heritage and larger humanitarian ideas. This chapter discusses the Jewishness in Bernstein by investigating various works, including his three symphonies. In 1945 Bernstein was commissioned to write a setting of the Hashkiveinu prayer for a Friday evening service by the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. This piece is discussed as a demonstration of various compositional styles that Bernstein applies that are not derived from Jewish tradition. Through differing approaches of direct use of melodies and text from the Jewish tradition, Bernstein provides an example of Jewishiness in art music with a complex and varied approach.

Bernstein was a prolific recording artist, and this chapter considers his vast recorded legacy, from his earliest recordings made in the 1940s to later ventures, including several important opera sets as well as a large swathe of orchestral repertoire, with the symphonies of some composers (notably Beethoven, Schumann, and Mahler) recorded more than once. As well as mainstream European repertoire, Bernstein never lost his enthusiasm for recording music by American composers, including outstanding discs of Copland, Foss, Harris and Ives. While Bernstein was usually pleased with the results of his sessions – whether in the studio or recorded live in concert – he also felt the need at times to return to composing. These creative phases were intermittent (Bernstein was usually at his happiest when working with other musicians), but the consequence was a healthy output of new work, most of which Bernstein himself subsequently recorded, including two cycles of his symphonies and recordings of his major stage works.

Bernstein’s fame, reputation, and personality have for the most part been seen as excessive and problematic. This perception militated from the start against his position in time, place, and tradition as a serious composer being influential or even accepted. Yet from the golden moment of opportunity for American composers in which he grew to adulthood to his barely noticed final works, he was following a diligent route of creative output that may yet bear fruit at greater distance from the man himself, though it would be difficult to claim that, taken as a whole, it has yet done so.

It was an essential dimension of Bernstein’s personality to be actively involved in public engagement with (usually) classical music, bringing it to the masses with an accessible approach. This chapter explores how he used writing and broadcasting to communicate his own passion for music, as well as his insights as a composer, conductor and musician. Talking about ‘what makes music tick’ was as much at the heart of his mission as composition and performance were, and whether talking about Beethoven and Bach on primetime television in Omnibus or publishing his public lectures as bestselling books, Bernstein’s efforts in music appreciation helped to solidify his image as perhaps America’s most recognizable and popular classical musician.

For Americans, the Cold War (1947−91) and the rivalry that resulted between the United States and the Soviet Union were real and constant. One celebrated figure affected by the shadows and triumphs of the Cold War was Leonard Bernstein. Yet, throughout his career, even through the worst conflicts, Bernstein steadfastly embraced the ideal of hope and a strong patriotic belief in peace, freedom, and democracy. From the outset, and both privately and publicly, he spoke about the importance of American leadership in upholding these ideals, even when governments (his own included) dismally failed to safeguard them. When his personal circumstances were at risk, he nevertheless continued to dedicate himself to these hopeful ideals in letters, writings, and popular media. In the end, when governments failed, he embraced the dignity and potential of the American people themselves with the responsibility to sustain these values through the Cold War climate.

Bernstein’s relationship with Aaron Copland was one of the most significant of his life. Starting with their first meeting in 1937, this chapter considers Copland’s musical influence on Bernstein as an emerging composer and the support and opportunities Copland provided during Bernstein’s formative years. It then goes on to explore the importance of Bernstein’s Copland advocacy on the conducting podium, with reference to major commissions, concerts, and recordings. Drawing on both their public and private comments and correspondence, the changing nature of their relationship and views on each other’s activities are traced, resulting in a shared portrait of more than five decades of friendship and musical connections.

The atmosphere of innovation and experimentation in the 1960s was not lost on Leonard Bernstein. His advocacy for the Mahler symphonies, for instance, was highly influential to a generation of composers excited by Mahler’s stylistic heterogeneity. Indeed, one of the best-known examples, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, was dedicated to Bernstein and a New York Philharmonic commission. Bernstein also collaborated with two other mavericks of that decade: the pianist Glenn Gould and the composer John Cage. With the former, Bernstein led a much-understood but controversial performance of the Brahms first piano concerto; with the latter, he created a programme with the Philharmonic about what he called aleatoric music, including a performance of Cage’s indeterminate work Atlas Eclipticalis. These encounters were of immense importance to all three artists.

Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins shared mutual desires to innovate and create in their individual fields and to create truly ‘American’ art of the twentieth century. Their collaborations for ballet (Fancy Free, On the Town, Facsimile, Age of Anxiety, Dybbuk) and musical theatre and film (West Side Story) propelled each into defining their specific style and artistic voices. Their aim to synthesize classical, symphonic aesthetics with rhythms and movements of Black and Latinx vernacular dance and music; their mutual interest in translating character, intention, emotion, mood, and narrative circumstances through non-textual mediums; and their active integration of music and movement in the creative process cinched their artistic connection. Even after the two went their separate ways, their legacies are forever entwined.

This chapter explores Leonard Bernstein’s work as pianist-conductor, including early influences that shaped Bernstein’s choice to conduct while playing, preferred repertoire (Mozart, Beethoven, Ravel and Gershwin), and reception by audience, and critics. Bernstein’s technique as conductor-pianist is analysed through audio and video recordings, as well as through the study of Bernstein’s annotated scores from the New York Philharmonic Archives. A brief history of conducting from the piano serves to contextualize this notable aspect of Bernstein’s career. Particular attention is given to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which was among Bernstein’s most frequently performed pieces while leading the orchestra from the piano. An analysis of three different recorded performances of Bernstein’s performance of the Rhapsody – two audio recordings and one televised broadcast – provide insight into significant moments (and challenges) for Bernstein as pianist-conductor, as well as key interpretive changes in his performance over time.

Leonard Bernstein stated in 1977, ‘The work I have been writing all my life is about … the crisis of our century, a crisis of faith’. In the decade between 1961 and 1971, he completed just three works, all choral-orchestral: ‘Kaddish’ (Symphony No. 3), Chichester Psalms, and Mass. This chapter views these works through the lens of Bernstein’s intense concern with a crisis of faith, at once societal and personal, philosophical and musical. In its reading of the scores, it seeks a deeper understanding of the music (including for practical performance), and of Bernstein’s propositions in theological as well as musical terms – concluding that his process is not merely one of presenting crises, but also one working to revise and reinvigorate larger faith and musical structures, as we see most spectacularly in Mass’s ritual of crisis and reaffirmation.

Few would argue the premise that Leonard Bernstein’s music sounds prototypically American. Most of his works include numerous passages that would only have been written by someone from the United States, especially one active from the 1940s to the 1980s. His frequent cultivation of musical tropes associated with various types of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, rock, Latin music, and concert music by the likes of Aaron Copland help make Bernstein’s interest in an American sound perhaps the single most significant factor that defines his musical style. This chapter considers how that style developed in terms of when and how he discovered and incorporated major American musical styles. The musical influences blend with other inspirations from Jewish music and Western concert music to render Bernstein one of the most eclectic composers of his generation.