There’s a theory that Walt Whitman’s memory rises in public awareness when his ideal of inclusive democracy sinks from view, that it returns us to our faith that all Americans can become parts of the whole. The same might be said of Leonard Bernstein, who was surely the most Whitmanesque figure that America ever gave…
Why do we fantasize about life during the galactic civil war in a galaxy far away? Would it really be worth it to live under the fascist Sith regime, just for the chance to train with Yoda and marshall the force? Yes. And why do so many of us harbor dreams of receiving our Hogwarts…
For some, Leonard Bernstein was the person who opened up the world of classical music for the first time. Others played in his orchestras. One man remembers hearing of Bernstein’s death as a 9-year-old. Composer, conductor and teacher, Bernstein touched the lives of millions of people around the world during his 50-year career, and now…
Larry and Toby Milstein, two rising young Jewish socialites, held a séance in Leonard Bernstein’s former apartment, attempting to summon the spirit of the deceased composer, according to The New York Times. The ghostly communication took place at The Dakota, the Central Park West building perhaps most famous for being the site of John Lennon’s…
The composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein may have been a genius, but he was, apparently, fickle with other people’s belongings. As The New York Times’s Michael Cooper reported, Bernstein borrowed a copy of Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” — “The Song of the Earth,” a song cycle for tenor and alto or tenor…
You can see Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” as a Broadway musical, as a film, and now, as a stop-motion gif. Well, sort of. The New York Public Library (NYPL) just digitized over 1300 photographs of the original production of “West Side Story” in 1957. The photographs, taken by Martha Swope, Friedman Abeles, Florence Vandamm,…
Filing in to 59E59 Theaters for “Maestro”— Hershey Felder’s bravura impersonation of and tribute to Leonard Bernstein—ticketholders were greeted with a stage projection of archival TV footage showcasing a young handsome Leonard Bernstein in lecture mode. Felder—as Bernstein—in word and at the keyboard—launches this autobiographical-cum-musical recitative by recalling his father Samuel Bernstein’s antipathy to piano…
Getty Images In 1971, the first time Maurice Peress conducted Leonard Bernstein’s “MASS,” the monumental piece echoed the life and death of John F. Kennedy, the social upheaval of the 1960s, and the morass of Vietnam. Spectators today might see “MASS” in a very different light — as a tragic commentary on U.S. involvement in…
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