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Overview
Composer, pianist, author, television personality, Harvard lecturer, cultural icon and conductor without peer, Leonard Bernstein was one of the most flamboyant and multifaceted musical giants of the twentieth century. His versatility and boundless energy were legendary. He captivated Broadway with such smash hits as On the Town and West Side Story, wrested and cajoled out of the world's best orchestras some of the most inspired performances ever heard, and introduced several generations of Americans to classical music with his "Omnibus" and "Young People's Concerts" television shows. In the most richly detailed and in-depth biography of Bernstein yet written, author Humphrey Burton vividly brings to life this controversial and contradictory figure. Incorporating hundreds of interviews with family, friends and colleagues, as well as exclusive access to Bernstein's own rich legacy of letters and papers, Leonard Bernstein reveals the maestro as he has never been seen before. Admired by the world, he felt an almost desperate need to be loved; married to the beautiful actress Felicia Montealegre, and father of three children, he also engaged in passionate affairs - private and eventually public - with other men; the New York Philharmonic's most influential music director since Toscanini, he felt himself constantly torn between the rival claims of conducting and composing. We see a Bernstein who embraced the world with extraordinary passion, a man with an enormous appetite for the center stage who, his critics would charge, often squandered his seemingly inexhaustible talent and energy. Bernstein's exuberant vitality and restless ambition are successfully brought to the page in this compelling portrait of one of the most beloved musical figures of our age.Burton successfuly brings to the page the exuberant vitality and unresolved obsessions that helped make Leonard Bernstein one of the most beloved and celebrated musical figures of our age.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Flamboyant composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein 1918-1990, who was America's ambassador to the world of serious music for most of his jam-packed life, has long needed a sober, well-researched and encompassing biography, and this is it. There have been tactful hagiographies John Gruen, malicious deconstructions Joan Peyser and ambivalent inside stories Burton Bernstein; but Burton, a British TV producer who knew Bernstein well but was no acolyte, has created, with the aid of family archives, a wealth of interviews and an interested layperson's sound musical knowledge, a full-length study unlikely to be surpassed. It is in many ways a tragic story, not of genius unrecognized--if anything Bernstein was overpraised in his life, both as composer and conductor--but of a protean nature overcome by the demands of celebrity status and an overweening ego. From the start ``Lenny'' was a determinedly colorful character, insistent on the limelight, extravagant of gesture and emotion. Whether he could have become a great composer, rather than a highly talented musical entertainer whose best-remembered work remains his Broadway musicals, will never be known; for his whole professional life was an agonized tightrope walk between the frenzies of adulation that greeted his conducting and his guilty sense that he was betraying his creative gift by not spending more time in the workroom. And even the slim body of work he did create in his crowded life emerged more often than not from collaborations with lyricists and librettists, almost as if he was afraid to be alone with his muse. Bernstein was a man who owed much to his Jewish heritage and Burton adroitly notes how much of his serious music had Jewish roots and experienced a strong sense of guilt about his bisexuality, particularly after the death of his betrayed wife Felicia. But as the reader begins to wonder whether such anguish is inescapable for a non-heterosexual American artist, there is the example of Bernstein's friend Aaron Copland to ponder: a man secure in his gay sexuality who created what is arguably a much more lasting body of work and had a greater influence on the musical life of his time. The fact that a biography can raise such questions is a tribute to the tact and imagination that infuse this one. Bernstein owes Burton a posthumous hug for having told it straight, with affection but no blinkers. Photos. MayBooknews
Burton, a friend and colleague of Bernstein's for 30 years, incorporates interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, and Bernstein's rich legacy of letters and papers, to reveal the personal and career conflicts of one of the musical giants of the 20th century. Includes b&w photos. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
May 1, 1994
Publisher
New York : Doubleday, c1994.
Pages
608
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780385423458