Customer Reviews

Leonard Bernstein

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This bio skillfully covers Bernstein's background, his philosophy, his methods of viewing and performing music. Bernstein was a man of conflict, always wishing to compose (indeed, he wanted to be remembered not as a conductor, primarily, but as a composer) but knew he had to remain with conducting in order to earn his living. And Bernstein was a splendid composer .. I personally think his Candide and West Side Story are masterpieces without peer, and his orchestral works are incredibly daring and far sighted for their time. Bernstein, though a genius, was all too human. He struggled endlessly with his sexuality, yet remained entirely devoted to his wife and children. Burton thoroughly explores Bernstein's many friendships with those in the music world, the most touching being his involvements with Copland and Mitropoulous. Both recognized Bernstein's genius, and were also painfully aware of his inner conflicts and fragile ego, and strove to uplift and encourage him so that he might make his true mark in the arts. The photos in this book are splendid, and Burton's writing is crisp and engaging. You will come away from this book with a renewed respect and enthusiasm for Bernstein the man and the musician.

It took me about 2 months to finish reading it, not because it wasn't a page-turner, but because it was a long book and also I'd been busy. It was actually a great page-turner. I could read on and on for 5-7 hours without a break.

Bernstein's personal letters to his friends and colleagues, including Aaron Copland, his thesis at Harvard, etc. were all very inspiring to read. There were quite a bit of poems he wrote also. The positive and negative sides of the great man were also well delivered without getting vulgar.
I really appreciated the author's knowledge about music and the classical music world and system.

The book makes you feel like you're living the life closely with the great man and gets you intellectually, musically, emotionally involved. You experience with him every success and failure Bernstein went through.
His talents were beyond human in some way, yet he was a man just like you and me. Sometimes his talents were greater than he as a man, and as a result the world occasionally saw him fall apart. The book is honest about his failures and misbehaviours without being accusatory. It makes you want to forgive the man for the wrongs he'd done. The burden he was carrying as genius was more than an ordinary man could bear.

The book also covers the Jewish culture, politics, world events, how Bernstein and his genius contributed to the world and American history, etc. in relations to his achievements.
There are enough interviews with his friends and family, reviews on Bernstein's works, letters etc. but the author uses his own narratives to tell us about the man, which is, I think, why this book is more solid and readable. Only, I wish there were more photographs. But oh well, you can't ask for everything.

Great, inspiring book. I might read it again.

I agree along with many that this is the definitive Bernstein biography. I have read it on and off for over a year now, and have gone back to particular sections not only to refresh my memory but to re-read Burton's fluid writing. An inspirational book about an all-around genius and the whirlwind tour of a life he lived. The book motivated me to delve into Berstein's life even further (quite costly y'know... with all the recordings, Norton Lectures, Young People's Concerts, various other video performances, writings, etc.)

This is the Bernstein bio that you'll read and re-read with continual pleasure. This book firmly places the great conductor in his time and his world, which is considerably different than the world of today. When Bernstein was alive, classical music was still important and a great deal of classical music was still being recorded. Today our classical music culture seems to have collapsed, at least in a commercial sense. The lunatic screech and drivel of hip-hop has taken over the music scene, and it may indeed be true we are getting what we deserve if we allow 2000 years of Western culture to disintegrate like a house of cards, but some of us can still appreciate the age of Bernstein as a golden age in terms of musical activity.

We can compare this well-balanced book with Peyser's bio, which is excessively simplistic due to Peyser's journalistic outlook. Journalists are forced to oversimplify their work because the average reader or viewer of journalism expects a dumbed-down story with a theme, a standard simple THEME that anyone can understand. In this sense, journalists create candy bars and Big Macs instead of serious literary cuisine. And maybe you prefer Hershey bars and hamburgers, okay? That's your privilege. But I don't like dumbed-down books, so I'll take Burton over Peyser any day.

Gay, gay, GAY! Lenny was GAY, all right? And of course we secretly long to know all the GAY DIRT, correct? So how much GAY DIRT is in the Burton book? Actually Burton is much more explicit than Peyser, but it really helps to know the gay code words. I asked a gay friend about the gay content in this book, and he returned it to me after he had used a red pen to underline lots of seemingly harmless words and phrases. He also gave me a quick lesson in translating these special coded expressions. And wow, yes indeed, the GAY DIRT is all there, but you need to understand the special coded language that Burton uses. If you're gay, you'll get it; and if you're not gay you'll need a translation just like I did. And that's as far as I'm going to go in that particular direction.

I will add that in terms of his personal life, Bernstein's image is still very heavily protected. I think that most of his love letters, for example, will never be published. In this respect Burton tells about as much as anyone can tell. Burton informs us, for example, about Charles Roth (pps. 201 and 245 of the hardbound book) who was a young Black conducting student who had a truly desperate crush on Lenny. Roth pursued Bernstein for years, endlessly sending him letters and packages (Lenny always returned them unopened) and threatening extravagant sexual blackmail based on Lenny's love letters, of which there were apparently a lot.

But today, all memory of the lovesick Charles Roth seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. You can, for example, Google ' leonard bernstein gay charles roth ' and find absolutely nothing at all about their relationship. This is the kind of total protection that most of us can only dream about, to have the trouble spots in our lives totally and completely erased from the omniscient archives of Google. And this didn't happen by accident. In fact, I would imagine that certain people are still working very hard to clean up the story of Lenny's extremely messy life. How many more of Bernstein's love letters will be hunted down and burned? Probably quite a few, but we'll never see them.

And who cares anyway? What really matters to me is the music. Here's just one example. Last week I bought the Deutsche Grammophon CD D100867 of Bernstein conducting the symphonic transcriptions of Beethoven's string quarters opp. 131 and 135. The album notes state that Bernstein dedicated this recording to his wife Felicia. And also that Lenny used some special notations created by Dmitri Mitropoulos to enhance his performance. I'll say just this about that marvelous CD. Every single note talks to me in a very special way. It's a truly astonishing recording, and I can guarantee that anyone who loves Beethoven will love this CD. To me, making music is the truly imporant part of Bernstein's life. All the rest of it is merely flyspecks on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Yeah, right, Michelangelo was gay too, but who the [....] cares? L'homme c'est rien, l'art c'est tout, as Flaubert famously stated, and he should know.

Humphrey Burton has written a tremendous biography of Bernstein (1918-1990). It is filled with details and insights into the man, his conducting, and his own compositions. Bernstein was renowned as a composer, as a performer on the piano, as a conductor, and as an educator, and Burton highlights all of these aspects. Bernstein was also gay, or bisexual; Burton indicates early on, "The reference to Bernstein's sexual problems underscored the confusion he felt about his sexuality, a confusion which he would continue to confront in his final year at Harvard." (He married in 1951, and had three children, to whom he was devoted.)

When he met Aaron Copland for the first time (at one of the "salons of the New York intellectual elite"), Bernstein told him he was a great fan, and announced that he could play Copland's Piano Variations from memory; Copland challenged him to do so, and he did. Bernstein later recalled, "So I played it, and they were all---he particularly---drop-jawed." Thus began a lifelong friendship between the two, that Burton chronicles in numerous places in the book.

After the 1944 premiere of On the Town, he accepted the advice of famed conductor Serge Koussevitsky and devoted himself to conducting. "Composing became a holiday diversion, fitted in between conducting tours and preseason parties. His activities as a pianist were restricted to playing the same handful of concertos with every new orchestra he conducted." In a speech Bernstein made in 1963, he said, "The composer comes first. In the beginning was the Note, and the Note was with God; and whoever can reach high for that note, reach high, and bring it back to us on earth, to our earthly ears¯he is a composer and to the extent of his reach partakes of the divine."

When his culminating work Mass (1971) was being produced, Bernstein said that "I feel young again, twenty-five years old, as I was when I was doing On the Town." The 1972 production of Carmen, which won a Grammy in 1973, yet so exhausted Bernstein that "apart from his own work, and a revival of Fidelio in Vienna, he never again conducted an opera in an opera house." Burton also clarifies the misreporting of Bernstein's exchange with a Black Panther leader in 1970 (the reporting made it seem as if Bernstein was engaging in "radical chic," erroneously reporting him as having said, "I dig absolutely").

One of Bernstein's major innovations was his work on television. From 1958-1972, Bernstein hosted and conducted "Young People's Concerts." As Burton notes, "They have never been rivaled in popular television education." Burton also opines that Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard "have proved to be among the most valuable and stimulating contributions ever made to musical education."

All in all, this is a detailed and very perceptive portrait of one of the most influential American musical figures of the 20th century. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Leonard Bernstein was always creating something. He worked with and knew many people. He may have had problems but those are nothing compared to his achievements. This biography starts with his birth straight through to his death. I read in sequence up until his graduation from Harvard and then I skipped around. I have very little of a music background and
because I became little bored, I found it more interesting to skip to the background of West Side Story, On the Town , the Black Panther party etc. I read everthing but not in sequence. After I finished this biography, I felt I really knew Bernstein and I liked him. I would highly recommend this biography. Bernstein's story is fascinating.

If you are interested in Bernstein, this is the biography to read. It neither raises him up too high nor tears him apart. Much of it deals with Bernstein's inner turmoil and how that impacted his relationships. Bernstein's humanity comes through very strongly. An enjoyable read, good pictures too.

I guess this is a really technical look at the composer's life without much backstage drama, because in leafing through the index, there's no mention of Carol Lawrence, Chita Rivera or Larry Kert, the famous cast members of the original production of "West Side Story." A short chapter is devoted to the musical, but without comments either from or on its legendary cast? Bizarre.

Call me shallow, but I don't want to read something that dry.