The Full Biography
Leonard Bernstein. Conductor. Composer. Teacher. The Lawrence boy who taught a country to hear an orchestra, then wrote the score a city still hums on a fire escape.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a man on a podium who cannot keep his body out of the music, sweat and a downbeat, the whole torso conducting. What the still cannot show is Louis Bernstein of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a Ukrainian-Jewish son of a beauty-supply man, an assistant who walked out on a Sunday in 1943 and became a national name before Monday’s paper was dry, and a husband whose marriage was real in the same years the rest of his life was also real.
He was born on August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, to Samuel Bernstein and Jennie Resnick. Samuel had come from Rovno. The household sold beauty supplies in the Boston orbit and wanted a respectable son, not a musician. The boy was Louis on the certificate.
At home they called him Leonard. After his grandmother died he made the home name legal, at sixteen. A piano arrived the way some households receive a relative they did not order. He never gave it back.
Harvard came, then the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia — conducting with Fritz Reiner, piano with Isabelle Vengerova — and summers at Tanglewood under Serge Koussevitzky, who treated him as an heir and a problem. The problem was American, theatrical, too many gifts in one jacket. The heir part is what happened next.
The door was a Sunday broadcast. On November 14, 1943, Bruno Walter fell ill. Bernstein was twenty-five, the New York Philharmonic’s assistant, and there was no rehearsal. He walked out and led Schumann, Strauss, Wagner.
CBS carried it. The next morning The New York Times put the debut on the front page. That is the civic door, and it is not a legend the family invented. A country at war heard a young American, Jewish, unready by every ordinary rule, hold a great orchestra without a net. He would spend the rest of his life spending that morning.
Jerome Robbins found him for the ballet Fancy Free in 1944. The same year On the Town took three sailors on twenty-four hours of wartime New York and put Bernstein’s concert muscle into a Broadway pit. Wonderful Town (1953) proved he could do the joke as well as the hymn. Candide (1956) opened as a problem and left behind an overture the world kept.
Then, in 1957, West Side Story — book by Arthur Laurents, lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim, dances by Robbins — put Romeo and Juliet on a New York street and refused to make the knives pretty. The 1961 film carried the score into every household that owned a television. It is the monument. It is not the whole catalogue.
Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety (1949), after Auden. Chichester Psalms (1965). Mass (1971), for the opening of the Kennedy Center, a theater piece that argued with the liturgy instead of decorating it. He would not pick a single lane. The lanes kept paying him anyway.
In 1958 the Philharmonic made him music director, the first American-born musician to hold that chair. He kept it through 1969. The same years he invented, on CBS, a classroom that did not feel like one. The Young People’s Concerts ran into the early 1970s.
A generation learned what a clarinet was for because a man on television refused to be bored by the explanation. He talked with his hands. He sat down at the piano. He treated children as an audience worth his best manners and his best gossip about a score.
That work is easy to file as charm. It was a second career, as serious as the Thursday-night subscription, and more people heard it.
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.Leonard Bernstein
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the fire escape. The turn is not West Side Story. The turn is that he would not choose: conductor, Broadway composer, television teacher, public man who showed up for causes and for a rehearsal the next morning.
The gifts leaked into each other. Critics who wanted a thinner life called it lack of discipline. The file calls it the job he actually did. He said music could name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable, and he spent forty years trying to prove the sentence in public, on too little sleep.
The concert desk was never a hobby beside the fire escape. Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety (1949), after Auden. Trouble in Tahiti (1952), a one-act opera about an American marriage that cannot talk. Serenade after Plato’s Symposium (1954), for violin and orchestra. The score for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). Candide (1956) opened as a problem and left behind an overture the world kept. West Side Story (1957) — book by Arthur Laurents, lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim, dances by Jerome Robbins — put Romeo and Juliet on a New York street and refused to make the knives pretty. The 1961 film carried the score into every household that owned a television. Symphony No. 3, Kaddish (1963), spoken and sung after the Kennedy assassination weather. Chichester Psalms (1965), Hebrew in an English cathedral commission. Mass (1971), for the opening of the Kennedy Center, a theater piece that argued with the liturgy instead of decorating it. Robbins’s Dybbuk (1974). Songfest (1977). He would not pick a single lane. The lanes kept paying him anyway.
In 1958 the Philharmonic made him music director, the first American-born musician to hold that chair. He kept it through 1969. Mahler became a civic project: cycles, recordings, a composer he taught a country to hear as if Vienna had a New York address. The Young People’s Concerts ran on CBS into the early 1970s. A generation learned what a clarinet was for because a man on television refused to be bored by the explanation. He talked with his hands. He sat down at the piano. He treated children as an audience worth his best manners and his best gossip about a score. Tanglewood remained a summer parish. The Israel Philharmonic became a second family desk. Home, when the calendar allowed one, was the Dakota on Central Park West and a house in Fairfield County, Connecticut: Felicia, Jamie, Alexander, Nina, a marriage that held more than one truth and a piano that did not get weekends off.
The Philharmonic years were a civic job: Thursday nights, Mahler cycles, a country taught to hear an orchestra as if it were a necessary room. The Young People’s Concerts were a second career on CBS, as serious as the subscription and heard by more people. West Side Story is the monument. On the Town, Candide, Mass, Kaddish, Chichester Psalms, The Age of Anxiety — the concert desk was never a hobby. Critics who wanted a thinner life called it lack of discipline. The file calls it the job he actually did. Lawrence is the first room. The Sunday in 1943 is the door. The Dakota is the last address. The fire escape is the still. The classroom is the correction.
Six things most people never knew
- The birth certificate said Louis. Leonard was the house name. He made it legal at sixteen, after a grandmother’s death.
- The 1943 debut had no rehearsal. Walter sick. A Sunday broadcast. The Times on the doorstep. That is the door, not a slow apprenticeship the public invented afterward.
- He was the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic. 1958 to 1969. The chair had not been built for a boy from Lawrence.
- The Young People’s Concerts were a generation’s music lesson. CBS, not a footnote. Children who never entered Carnegie Hall still heard him name the instruments.
- The marriage to Felicia Montealegre was a real marriage. So was the rest of his erotic life. The arrangement strained. It also held, until illness unmade the house.
- West Side Story is the monument, not the pile. On the Town, Candide, Mass, The Age of Anxiety, Chichester Psalms — the concert desk was never a hobby.
He married Felicia Montealegre, an actress born in Costa Rica and raised in Chile, on September 9, 1951. Jamie was born in 1952, Alexander in 1955, Nina in 1962. He was gay, or bisexual; the precise word has been argued by people who were not in the room. She knew.
They had an arrangement that allowed the work, the household, and the other life to exist in one address. In the mid-1970s he left. He came back when her cancer returned. She died on June 16, 1978.
He did not recover the way a public man is supposed to recover. This desk names the truth and does not tour the bedroom. The marriage was a marriage, and the rest was the rest. The children have spent adulthood explaining both without surrendering their mother or their father.
The later years
After he left the Philharmonic title in 1969 he became a guest the great orchestras could not refuse: Vienna, Israel, London, the old European desks that had once doubted an American could hold them. He took the title of laureate conductor in New York and kept walking onto that podium when the week needed him. He recorded as if the tape were a second memory: Mahler cycles, Beethoven, his own scores, a discography that looks like a man afraid the morning might not come. A Quiet Place (1983) folded Trouble in Tahiti into a larger opera about a family that still cannot talk. Tanglewood each summer remained a classroom with an orchestra attached. The Young People’s Concerts were over; the teaching was not. Students and young conductors still stood where he pointed.
Felicia died on June 16, 1978. He had left and come back when her cancer returned. He did not recover the way a public man is supposed to recover. The Dakota stayed the New York address. Fairfield County stayed a second house when the calendar allowed one. The children — Jamie, Alexander, Nina — became the household that had to explain both the marriage and the rest of his life without surrendering either parent. He kept working. Vienna kept calling. Israel kept calling. Tanglewood kept a summer desk. The lungs were already the other plot. He had smoked the way some men conduct, without a rest. Friends from the Vienna years describe a man who could empty a rehearsal and a dinner with the same voltage, and who did not know how to take a year off.
On Christmas Day 1989, after the Wall, he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth in Berlin — at the Schauspielhaus, then again for the city — and had the chorus sing Freiheit, freedom, where Schiller had written joy. It was theater. It was also the exact use of a famous man in a week that needed one. In the summer of 1990 he conducted at Tanglewood, including a program that people who were there still talk about as a man spending the last of the voltage. The body was finished with the pace. He had already told friends the lungs were the other score. In early October he announced he would no longer conduct. Five days after that announcement, on October 14, 1990, he died in New York of complications of emphysema and a tired heart. He was seventy-two. Jamie, Alexander, and Nina were the estate and the memory. The Dakota, the scores, the videotaped classrooms, and a city that still puts “Tonight” on a fire escape when it wants to feel young — those remained. The last chapter is a guest podium, a substituted word in Berlin, and a retirement that lasted less than a week. Lawrence is the first room. The Sunday in 1943 is the door. The Dakota is the last address.
After he was gone
The children kept the archive and the name from becoming only a brand. West Side Story returns whenever a director thinks the street has changed enough to need the knives again. The Young People’s Concerts still teach, on recordings, what a teacher looks like when he is also the most famous man in the building. Felicia is in the file as a wife, not a saint and not a casualty.
The podium footage still moves before the downbeat does.
He came out of Lawrence, changed a first name, walked on for Walter, wrote sailors and Sharks, took the Philharmonic, taught the country on CBS, married a woman who knew him, lived the other life beside that marriage, buried her, opened Berlin with a substituted word, and died of the cigarettes and the pace. The still on the podium will last. It should. The life behind it was a Sunday, a fire escape, a classroom, and a household that held more than one truth.
If you only remember West Side Story, you have the monument. If you remember the unready debut, the children’s concerts, Felicia, and a man who would not pick a single desk, you have him.
Portrait: Jack Mitchell · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons