No one so inspired the generation of American musicians born in the 1940s and 1950s as did Bernstein, an ‘inescapable’ and ‘incontroverible’ icon of the 1960s and beyond. His celebrity was particularly linked to the explosive growth of television, beginning with appearances on Omnibus (from 1954) and the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts (from 1958). Two texts complicate his reputation as Wunderkind of American music: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ (1970) and Leon Botstein’s ‘The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein’ (1983). But by the time of his 100th birthday celebrations in 2018, Bernstein’s stature as cultural icon seemed intact and secure, resting largely on West Side Story.

While scholars have often acknowledged the relationship between Bernstein and Blitzstein by focusing on their Jewish immigrant backgrounds, shared love for the musical theatre, modernist approach to music, and socio-political goals, there is little discussion on how their sexual orientation might have shaped this friendship and their work. Yet, attempting to understand the bond between the two composers, both married yet unequivocally gay, without considering their queer identities leaves a major component out of the picture. In this chapter, I consider the queer intimacies that are at the core of their bond and how works that they dedicated to each other – Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, an opera about gender alienation; and Blitzstein’s Six Elizabethan Songs, a set of pieces concealing possible homoerotic meanings – can uncover new perspectives on their friendship and compositional approaches.

The Library of Congress is the premiere institution for research on the life and works of Leonard Bernstein. This chapter details how Bernstein’s relationship with the library was established, documents the donations he made to the library during his lifetime, and describes how the relationship with the Bernstein estate has continued to thrive. This chapter gives an overview of the richness of the library’s Leonard Bernstein Collection, one of the most exceptional in the Music Division in terms of the variety and scope of material it contains. In addition to documenting Bernstein’s work and creative process, the Bernstein Collection provides countless avenues of research for those studying music history, television history, education, the Civil Rights movement, LGBTQ+ topics, Jewish identity, and pop culture. The chapter also highlights relevant archival material found elsewhere in the Music Division’s collections, and connects readers with digitized collection material available on the Library of Congress website.

Early on, Bernstein often conducted operas (Cherubini, Bellini) and other sung stage works (Blitzstein, Weill). He would later make renowned opera recordings in New York and Vienna. His greatest contributions to the genre are three quite varied compositions. The short, all-sung Trouble in Tahiti (1952) is bitingly satirical. Candide (1956) is an operetta, with plentiful spoken dialogue. The words were provided by a half-dozen collaborators, partly for later productions (each production included a somewhat different selection of musical numbers). The entirely serious A Quiet Place (1983−86) deals with family tensions and disappointments. Its style is highly eclectic, ranging from blues to twelve-tone. A Quiet Place has one official version (in which Trouble in Tahiti becomes two interludes in Act 2) and one in which the orchestration has been reduced by Garth Edwin Sunderland. The latter omits Tahiti but restores important passages that the official version omits.

Bernstein was a popular figure, in the conventional sense of garnering attention and admiration from a great many people, but his relationship to popular music was hardly straightforward. Bernstein expressed scepticism about much of popular music from the 1960s on and his personal taste hewed to the musics of his youth, such as swing-era jazz, blues, and the Golden-era of Broadway and popular song, while occasionally expanding to include rock’n’roll. However, Bernstein also viewed popular music as a kind of wellspring that composers could draw from, whether it was Mozart’s Magic Flute or his own West Side Story. Not only could borrowing from popular music revitalize tonal classical music for the twentieth century, as opposed to twelve-tone serialism and other mid-century modernist trends, but Bernstein also firmly believed that popular musics, particularly jazz, were the key to creating a uniquely American musical style.

Bernstein’s later Broadway shows, West Side Story and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, represent his greatest smash hit success and his biggest flop. This chapter focuses on the music of these two shows, and more specifically on what happened to the music after the initial runs were over, when the theatres went dark, and how, in both cases, the music became abstracted from its original context through arrangements, cover versions, and use in advertising, film, and television, sometimes reframing the meaning of the original material. As is to be expected, the two stories are quite different: West Side Story has become deeply embedded in the culture while 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was nearly banished to obscurity. The reception of both shows, however, reveals something about the enduring nature of Bernstein’s music.

Bernstein loved to conduct works (e.g., by Liszt, Mahler, Ravel) inspired by dance rhythms and folk songs of various lands and peoples. His own compositions, similarly, often invoke distant places and their musics. Fancy Free and West Side Story include such Latin American dance-types as danzón, mambo, and cha-cha-chá. The soprano in Trouble in Tahiti sings about a film full of stereotypical Pacific-island ‘natives’. Other references to various Elsewheres occur in Songfest (a rhythmically adventurous Latin American sound for ‘A Julia Burgos’; Middle Eastern stylistic allusions in ‘Zizi’s Lament’), On the Town (the Congacabana nightclub scene; the humorously klezmer-ish, rather than Arab-sounding, call of Rajah Bimmy), Wonderful Town (‘Conga!’), and two works inspired by visits to Palestine/Israel: ‘Silhouette (Galilee)’, based on a well-known Arab song (including some Arabic words); and Four Sabras, no. 2, for piano (‘Idele, the Chasidele’), which abounds in typically East European Jewish musical traits.

By the mid-sixties, Leonard Bernstein was engaging with the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War resistance. Bernstein took part in greeting Martin Luther King in the Selma Alabama fifty-four mile march to gain voting rights. He campaigned for war resistor Eugene McCarthy in the election of 1968. In 1970, Bernstein’s and his wife Felicia’s fundraising support for the Black Panthers Legal Defense brought him under public attack organized by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover. In 1971, Bernstein’s support for war resistor Daniel Berrigan, and his seeking the latter’s help in writing the libretto for Mass, brought him again under attack by Hoover, this time with the connivance of President Nixon, who had missed the inaugural performance of Mass for fear that Bernstein would publicly humiliate him. Nixon now placed Bernstein on his infamous ‘Enemies List’, but Bernstein was saved from victimization by Hoover’s death and Nixon’s forced resignation due to the Watergate scandal.

Stephen Schwartz entered Bernstein’s life at a crucial moment when the composer needed assistance in writing Mass, especially with the lyrics for English ‘tropes’ that transmit much of the show’s message and political commentary. Schwartz has stated that he also helped Bernstein develop the loose plot that ties Mass together as an organic whole, an assertion that has been accepted by the Leonard Bernstein Office. Bernstein and Schwartz were very rushed and worked through the score mostly in performance order with little time for revisions. This chapter includes biographical material on Schwartz before he worked on Mass and his recollections of which lyrics he wrote for the show, his opinions on Mass and the work’s continuing popularity, his memories of working with Bernstein, how Schwartz later revised his lyrics for Mass, and how he has felt the influence of the older composer in his own Broadway works.

As a socially and politically engaged composer, Leonard Bernstein created works for the stage that dramatize and explicate the changing status of women, gender relations, and heteronormative sexuality in the society around him. His Trouble in Tahiti (1951), for all its parodic hilarity, constitutes a powerful critique of bourgeois marriage under McCarthyism and establishes the garden as a recurring trope in his subsequent theatrical compositions. The woman-authored Wonderful Town (1953) turns a nostalgic eye on working women in 1930s Greenwich Village, and, elsewhere in Manhattan, West Side Story (1957) both advances the garden trope and gives us Anita, the wise and powerful Latina. In Trouble in Tahiti’s sequel, A Quiet Place (1983) the garden returns musically and textually to prompt a loving reconciliation between non-binary characters and the family patriarch, brokered by a woman.

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.