Get ready to honor 100 years of Lenny
Groups worldwide prepare to conduct Bernstein tributes
Where is Leonard Bernstein now that we need him?
One of America’s musical Renaissance men has long been gone, having died Oct. 14, 1990, at the age of 72, in his apartment at the Dakota in New York.
But the world is getting ready to celebrate the centennial of his Aug. 25, 1918, birth with a twoyear global extravaganza of commemorations kicking off Friday at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
The calendar of events for Leonard Bernstein at 100 now reaches into the thousands around the world and includes performances of symphonies, operas and ballets, lectures, exhibits, films and music festivals, and even a memory project collecting reminiscences from friends, fans and anyone else who ever met him, which turns out to be quite a lot of people.
The Leonard Bernstein Office oversees his legacy, but the commemoration has mostly grown organically since his three children and his many admirers called attention to the centennial and encouraged the music world to “take it from there,” says daughter Jamie Bernstein, 65.
“And boy, are they taking it from there,” she says. “It’s insane: Our colleagues keeping a database of events around the world said it had passed 2,000 last week — our heads are exploding.” She and her sister, Nina, and brother, Alexander, are hoping to make it to many of these events.
The celebration is a testament to Bernstein’s central position in American culture of the 20th century. At the time of his death, The New York Times obituary hailed him as “one of the most prodigally talented and successful Leonard Bernstein was a composer, conductor, writer, activist and more. He died in 1990. musicians in American history.”
He certainly was, and so much more: Composer of symphonies, operas, ballets and stage musicals. Internationally famed conductor. Writer, Hollywood star, teacher, humanitarian, political, anti-war and civil-rights activist.
“Whatever was happening in the world, where there was injustice or oppression or intolerance, my dad was always quick to speak out,” Jamie Bernstein says.
He was influential enough to be viewed as a threat by some: He was on President Nixon’s enemies list, and his FBI file eventually amounted to 800 pages, she adds.
“He was consistently engaged with the world around him, advocating for social justice and world peace through the music he composed and the ways in which he capitalized on his celebrity as a conductor,” says Carol Oja, a professor of music and American Studies at Harvard and author of Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War.
If you know only one thing about Bernstein (that’s STINE, please), it’s this: He’s the guy who composed the music for West Side Story, the 1957 stage musical (six Tony nominations, two wins) story of Romeo and Juliet set among street gangs of New York.
The movie version won 10 Oscars in 1962 but it’s the countless stage productions ever since — featuring jazzy Jets and Latinsyncopated Sharks high-stepping on school stages across America and the world — that have helped keep Bernstein a boldfaced name even among Millennials.
“(Young people) might have heard of West Side Story because they saw the film or the video, and because that is probably the work most in the forefront of all my dad’s work,” says Jamie Bernstein.
“Those who grew up in the second half of the last century knew who he was because he was ubiquitous, but ... young people are much less likely to know him or encounter his work.”
Leonard Bernstein at 100 aims to introduce them to the man known by all as “Lenny.”
“He would be thrilled,” his daughter says. “His music is getting so much attention. He wanted to be most remembered as a composer — it was the hardest and what he cared most about.”
It’s tempting to wonder what Bernstein would make of the times we live in — to imagine he would be an enthusiast of Twitter, that he’d be leading protests outside the White House, that he might be hosting fundraising dinners for Black Lives Matter.
“He was so broadband, though that is not a word he would have known,” Jamie Bernstein says. “He did so many different things, breaking the barriers between disciplines and genres. It made him the ultimate Renaissance man, reinterpreted for the 20th century.”
Jamie Bernstein is most looking forward to attending music festivals her father founded in Japan and Germany, and to the February night in Los Angeles when Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic & Master Chorale will perform MASS, a work commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy to inaugurate the Kennedy Center in 1971.
“It has an orchestra, a marching band, a rock band, a blues band, multiple choruses, an antiwar element — it’s fantastic, it has more of my dad in it than any other piece he wrote,” Jamie Bernstein says.
Alas, “my dad didn’t live long enough to see it performed at the Vatican in 2000 at the request of Pope John Paul II.”