A man, a country and an era came together in Leonard Bernstein, the musician of the American century.
After 150 years of insecurity as this country gazed across the sea at the edifices of European culture, here was the New World finally in command. Composer, conductor, arranger, pianist, television personality, star, Bernstein — a Jew, crucially, just a few years after the Holocaust — marched
Mahler back into Vienna, a second wave of liberation, a musical Marshall Plan. Bold, maybe a little brash; tender, maybe a little sentimental; difficult to work with yet desperate to please: Bernstein’s qualities were America’s, too.
He was born 100 years ago on Aug. 25, and his centenary is being celebrated as his achievement — and the smilingly confident place and time he symbolized — seems ever more unrepeatable. Who today could write both “West Side Story” and three thorny, searching symphonies? Who could bring together Brahms and the Beatles on national television, and have millions watch? To what maestro’s left-wing political dalliances would New York magazine devote a cover story in 2018?
Yet if there will never be another Bernstein, and if the high culture for which he tirelessly evangelized keeps drifting farther from the mainstream, his legacy is still clear, and secure. When he died, in 1990, he left us a charge to listen to music, of all kinds, with endless enthusiasm; to devote ourselves to both the creation of new work and the revival of old; to make every facet of culture accessible to all.
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