Leonard Bernstein at 100

IF YOU were a well-heeled Massachusetts lady in the late 1920s and wanted your hair fixed like the movie stars, there was one man to turn to: Samuel Bernstein. In 1927, this entrepreneurial immigrant, who had arrived in New York from Tsarist Russia aged 16, acquired the only local licence to sell the Frederics Permanent Wave machine for curling hair. Like many businessmen of the times, he expected his eldest son to follow him into the family firm.

But Louis Bernstein, born in August 1918 and known to everyone as Lenny (he officially changed his name to Leonard as a teenager), had different ideas. The family had no musical roots to speak of, but ten-year-old Lenny found himself drawn obsessively to his aunt Clara’s piano. No matter that his father remained vehemently opposed to the notion that he should make music his life, there was but one path ahead.

For all his early misgivings, Samuel later conceded that his son was a genius. In his passport, Leonard Bernstein simply called himself a “musician”—characteristic humility from a man whose broad achievements are unique in musical history. Bernstein was a conductor whose interpretive gifts over the course of half a century shone light on the classics from Haydn to Mahler, Bartok to Stravinsky. He was a composer not just of Broadway masterpieces like “West Side Story”, but of ballet, opera and chamber music; orchestral, instrumental, choral and vocal works; and even a film score (“On the Waterfront”, starring a young Marlon Brando). He was a fine concert pianist and pioneering broadcaster; an educator, Harvard lecturer, writer and humanitarian; a husband, father, lover—and a bona fide celebrity with the good looks, charisma and hair (ironically) of a film star. Such a multifaceted life was not without complexities, contradictions and critics—but oh, what a life.

The Bernstein legend was forged on November 14th 1943. Having been out partying after the premiere of his song cycle “I Hate Music”, the 25-year-old was woken by a phone call at 9am requesting that he replace the indisposed maestro Bruno Walter in a major concert that afternoon. It was to be a live, nationwide radio broadcast with the New York Philharmonic (where Bernstein was two months into a gig as assistant conductor) featuring a fearsome programme including Schumann, Strauss and Wagner. There was no time for rehearsal. Bernstein put on “the one good suit that I had” (a double-breasted sharkskin) and went to Carnegie Hall. “No signs of strain or nervousness”, remarked a dazzled New York Times the next day—on its front page. Whether it knew it or not, America was seeking a musical figure who could harness the European classical tradition with a certain homegrown energy. They had found their man.

Bernstein was curious about all sorts of music, including jazz, folk, blues and klezmer. His own daughter Jamie—one of three children Bernstein had with his wife, Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean actress—tells of the joy of devouring Beatles LPs with him. (He was mad for them: “I learned more about music by listening to the Beatles with my dad than I think I did any other way.”) Bernstein’s own music, whether destined for Broadway or the concert hall, is helplessly eclectic—as well as unapologetically tonal when Schoenberg-influenced serialism was all the rage. His scores blithely, ingeniously united disparate musical elements and forged a path for future musical mixologists that would have been unthinkable without him.

Great classical artists trade in elevated abstractions and are often given licence by the public to stay in ivory towers, seemingly unconcerned about the messy realities of life as it is actually lived. There are some shining exceptions, such as Yehudi Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich and Daniel Barenboim. Bernstein, a lifelong progressive—“liberal and proud of it”, he once said—was a pioneer in this way.

The charitable and humanitarian causes he supported were legion. “All his life,” his daughter Jamie recalls, he “clung hard to the belief that by creating beauty, and by sharing it with as many people as possible, artists had the power to tip the earthly balance in favour of brotherhood and peace.” After the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, he declared: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” At the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, “empowered by the moment” as he later said, Bernstein conducted a concert of Beethoven’s ninth symphony and was inspired to change a vital word in the Schiller poem which forms the final “Ode to Joy” movement, replacing the word Freude (“joy”) with Freiheit (“freedom”). It became known indelibly as the “Berlin Freedom Concert”; Bernstein was ever the showman.

Meanwhile, his own compositions attempted to address the world around him. His “Symphony No. 2: The Age of Anxiety” explored the psychic damage of the second world war. “Candide” was expressly conceived as a protest against 1950s McCarthyism. “West Side Story” tackled, with eternal relevance, the tragedy of gang warfare and the evils of bigotry and prejudice.

Bernstein’s political side did not go unnoticed. The FBI’s dossier on him included some 1,000 items. Another cache of documents, released in 2011, proves that the conflicts he exemplified in his career—between classical purism and the Broadway stage, between the public glory of conducting and the private isolation of composing—were a mirror to the internal tensions he battled as a gay man who genuinely wanted to be a family man, loving husband and father. In 1951 Felicia had told him, in a letter: “You are a homosexual and may never change…I am willing to accept you as you are.” They remained happily married until her death in 1978.

Bernstein died, aged 72, in 1990. There have since been bold classical composers who straddle genres; charismatic conductors who have the common touch; visionary teachers who practise joyous inclusivity and access. But Bernstein was Bernstein. This year, more than 2,000 events will attempt to honour that singular legacy. From the American cities where he was such a beloved fixture (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington and Chicago) to Europe east and west (London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest) to countries as culturally diverse as Japan, China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Israel, 100 years since Bernstein’s birth, there is, it seems, a place for him everywhere.