Leonard Bernstein

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

Leonard Bernstein was born on August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was the son of Ukrainian-Jewish parents, Jennie (née Resnick) and Samuel Joseph Bernstein, both of whom immigrated to the United States from Rovno (now Ukraine).

Leonard's father was a businessman who started the Samuel Bernstein Hair Company, which provided barber shops with cosmetics. Leonard’s mother, Jennie, worked in a factory before becoming a full-time mother to him and his sister Shirley and brother Burton. 

Leonard was a sickly child. He suffered badly from hay fever and sometimes turned blue from asthma. 

His grandmother insisted that his first name be Louis, but his parents always called him Leonard, which they preferred. He officially changed his name to Leonard when he was fifteen, shortly after his grandmother's death. To his friends and many others he was simply known as "Lenny."

Leonard Bernstein. By Jack Mitchell,

One day, after returning home from school when he was ten, Leonard saw a piano that his Aunt Clara had lent to the family. He soon started to improvise at the piano and play whenever he could, and it was not long before he was taking lessons. 

When he was fourteen, Leonard attended his first orchestral concert with the Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by Arthur Fiedler, an experience that he never forgot. 

He had a variety of piano teachers in his youth, including Helen Coates for $6 a lesson. She later became his secretary. 

In 1935 Bernstein graduated from Boston Latin School, and at seventeen he was admitted to Harvard University, where he studied music. 

In 1939, Bernstein graduated from Harvard with honors, and made his debut as a conductor. Bernstein went to New York for the summer and began accompanying The Reviewers, a comedy troupe comprised of lyricist and playwright Adolph Green, Green's comedienne and writing partner Betty Comden, and Broadway and Judy Tuvim (later known as film performer Judy Holliday),

After graduating from Harvard, Bernstein enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where he studied conducting with Fritz Reiner.

CAREER

Bernstein made a dramatic conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1943. The concert  was broadcast live across the US, he became famous and began to receive invitations to write music for and perform with several orchestras. 

The mid-1940s through the 1950s were very productive years for Leonard Bernstein. His first Broadway musical, On the Town, opened in New York in 1944. Other Bernstein musicals that were to follow included Wonderful Town (1953) and Candide (1956). 

Bernstein had worked with the choreographer Jerome Robbins and the writer Arthur Laurents on the musical West Side Story intermittently since Robbins first suggested the idea in 1949. Finally, with the addition of lyricist Stephen Sondheim to the team and a period of concentrated effort, it received its Broadway premiere in 1957. 

Bernstein and Sondheim took longer than planned to complete West Side Story because every Thursday they downed pens to solve fiendishly difficult crosswords from the BBC magazine The Listener.

Bernstein embraced the new medium of television in 1954, becoming the first conductor to give televised lectures on classical music.

The success of Bernstein’s television series Omnibus and Young People’s Concerts in the mid-1950s was the result of his contagious enthusiasm for his subject matter and the non-threatening manner that he used to introduce young people to classical music. Bernstein won an Emmy Award for the show in 1956–57. 

In 1958, at the age of forty, Bernstein became the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic.  He resigned the position in 1969 in order to spend more time composing and on other projects.

Bernstein's style of conducting was highly theatrical. Bernstein used a little nod of his head or moved his hand slightly for a quiet note. Then he would swing his arms dramatically for a loud crescendo. 

In 1969, Bernstein resigned as musical director of the New York Philharmonic in order to spend more time composing and on other projects.

PERSONAL LIFE

He became a prodigious pianist, conductor, composer, and lecturer, although he suffered from asthma throughout his life. Audiences often heard him wheezing above the orchestra.

His asthma kept Bernstein from serving in the military during World War II.

Bernstein was not related to film composer Elmer Bernstein, but the two men were friends, and even shared a certain physical similarity.

He was close to the Kennedy family. After Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Bernstein conducted at the funeral mass, featuring the "Adagietto" movement from Mahler's Symphony No. 5.

Leonard Bernstein often had to leave his beloved dachshunds behind when he was on tour and would, to fill the gap, commandeer other people's dachshunds. 

Leonard Bernstein married the Chilean-born American actress Felicia Cohn Montealegre on September 10, 1951. It has been suggested that Bernstein chose to marry partly to dispel rumors of his homosexuality in order to help secure a major conducting appointment.

A longtime heavy smoker, Bernstein battled emphysema from his mid-50s.

In 1976 Bernstein took the decision that he could no longer repress his homosexuality and he left his wife Felicia for a period to live with the writer Tom Cothran. The next year she was diagnosed with lung cancer and eventually Bernstein moved back in with her and cared for her until she died on June 16, 1978.

In total Bernstein was awarded 16 Grammys for his recordings in various categories including several for recordings released after his death. He was also awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1985.

Bernstein died October 14, 1990 (aged 72) in his New York apartment at The Dakota, of a heart attack brought on by mesothelioma.

Sources Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, Wikipedia