Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was the first conductor born and educated in the United States of America to receive world-wide acclaim. He is perhaps best known for his long conducting relationship with the New York Philharmonic, which included the acclaimed Young People's Concerts series, and his compositions including West Side Story, Candide, and On the Town. He is known to baby boomers primarily as the first classical music conductor to make many television appearances, all between 1954 and 1989. Additionally he had a formidable piano technique and was a highly respected composer. He is one of the most influential figures in the history of American classical music, championing the works of American composers and inspiring the careers of a generation of American musicians.
“We're neither pure, nor wise, nor goodWe'll do the best we know.We'll build our house and chop our woodAnd make our garden grow.And make our garden grow!”
“This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely,more beautifully,more devotedly than ever before.”
“Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”
“I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.”
“I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”
“Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.”
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.”
“Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”
“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”