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.

This chapter examines Bernstein’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union. Born four years before the creation of the Soviet Union and dying eleven months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, his life story, including his rise to global prominence, paralleled the history of the Soviet republics. As an American of Ukrainian heritage, the composer had personal ties to the region. I examine these family connections and their complexities; his lifelong interest in Russian classical music; his period of attraction to Communism as an ideology, its consequences, and his statements in support of US–Soviet peace; and his 1960 cultural-diplomacy-related tour of the USSR with the New York Philharmonic. Ultimately, I argue that the United States’ relationship with the USSR had a profound impact not only on his family life and conducting career, but also on his attitudes to music-stylistic choices.

Although Leonard Bernstein wrote music in a variety of genres and styles, he was unusual in that he consistently created music infused with a Jewish flavour, whether consciously or not, throughout his career. Bernstein’s Jewish background has provided ample fodder for numerous articles and books, but most scholars are unaware of the true significance of his childhood synagogue in Boston, Congregation Mishkan Tefila. Its rabbi, Herman Rubenovitz (1883−1966), the cantor, Iszo Glickstein (1891−1947), and especially its music director, Solomon Braslavsky (1887−1975), made a lifelong impression on Bernstein. Mishkan Tefila served as the venue for some of Bernstein’s earliest piano performances, and he heard an organ and a choir here for the first time; it continued to serve as a Jewish anchor for him even as an adult. In the absence of early formal musical training, the synagogue became, in effect, Bernstein’s conservatory, and these three men his professors.

Gustav Mahler’s impact on Leonard Bernstein’s career is undeniable. Empathizing with Mahler’s dual role as conductor and composer, Bernstein commented that both he and Mahler led double lives. Bernstein continued emphasizing his connection to Mahler, notably in an essay entitled ‘Mahler: His Time Has Come’. Ultimately, his appreciation of Mahler’s music spanned a lifetime and Bernstein eagerly advocated for recognition of Mahler’s genius. This chapter focuses on three events during Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic years that illustrate the importance of Mahler to Bernstein’s tenure: the 1960 Mahler Festival, the 1963 death of John F. Kennedy, and the 1967 Mahler symphonic recordings. Although these three events are in no way all-encompassing of Bernstein’s efforts to reintroduce Mahler to the world, they outline the trajectory of the New York Philharmonic throughout the 1960s and show how Bernstein educated and inspired his audiences to a new appreciation of an old composer.

This is an examination of Leonard Bernstein’s impact as conductor and musical advocate. He was a champion of the works of Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler at a time when their work was unfashionable, bringing them to a much larger audience. The American composer he admired most was Aaron Copland, whose ’Connotations’ he led to open Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He was not in sympathy with most ‘12 tone’ music but did lead avant-garde works by the composers Lukas Foss, Elliott Carter, John Cage, and others. He conducted the world premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Turangalila Symphony’ in Boston in 1949 but never presented it again. He was an adept Straussian but only led the works composed before World War I. This was also his favourite period of Stravinsky’s work, although he added the three symphonies to his repertory in later years. On television, he led studies of rock and jazz. He conducted and recorded much of the standard repertory from the nineteenth century onwards, with only a few forays into Baroque and Classical-era music, with a particular emphasis on Haydn. There is some discussion of Bernstein’s podium manner and the conductors he influenced.

A large amount of Latin American popular, folk, and art music circulated in the United States during the twentieth century. It was not just popular music composers that had dialogue with it; classically trained composers such as Leonard Bernstein also did. However, more than the music tradition that Bernstein absorbed into his compositional language in works such as On the Town (1944) and West Side Story (1957), this chapter argues that Latin American music also served as a medium to express Bernstein’s ideas and feelings about the US socio-political and cultural landscape. Furthermore, the chapter shows that Bernstein’s dialogue and collaboration with Latin American composers at the Tanglewood Music Festival, conducting the New York Philharmonic during the Latin American tour (1958), and performing Latin American music works at the Young People’s Concerts (1958−72), all contributed to and enhanced his vision as a cultural broker.

Bernstein mentioned Kurt Weill on only a few occasions, and yet his career as a composer for the stage followed a similar path. In particular, he created works that transcend the boundaries between opera and commercial theatre, tackling socio-political topics while writing melodies that reached the mainstream. This chapter traces the influence of Weill on Bernstein, who encountered Die Dreigroschenoper as a college student and would go on to conduct the premiere of Marc Blitzstein’s English adaptation, The Threepenny Opera, in 1952. The specific aesthetic traits which Bernstein absorbed from Weill’s scores are illustrated through comparative analyses of numbers from Trouble in Tahiti, Candide and West Side Story with, respectively, Lady in the Dark, Die Dreigroschenoper and Street Scene. Motivic, harmonic and structural elements of intertextuality reveal that Weill’s formal experimentation tilled the soil for works of music theatre that could be both indigenous and worldly, sophisticated and accessible.

Although the concert hall was perhaps Bernstein’s first love, musical theatre was always very close to his heart, and this chapter explores his first three works written for the Broadway stage: On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953) and Candide (1956). There is an exploration of the origin and context of each show, and of the collaborative processes behind their development, from the tight team-work of On the Town and Wonderful Town to the personnel problems of Candide. The author considers the wide variety of musical styles utilized by Bernstein, particularly his blending of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ techniques and sounds. There is a discussion of how the stories and libretti of the three shows reflect aspects of the social, historical and political atmosphere of the time, and of the importance and influence of these early works.