Between Broadway and Beethoven
Leonard Bernstein was America's first classical-music superstar — a conductor of genius, the composer of West Side Story, a dazzling pianist and the greatest music teacher television has ever known. No musician of the twentieth century moved between the bright lights of Broadway and the concert hall with such ease, and nobody made classical music feel more alive.
An overnight legend
On 14 November 1943, the New York Philharmonic's 25-year-old assistant conductor was told at the last minute to replace the ailing Bruno Walter. With no rehearsal, in a concert broadcast live across America, Bernstein triumphed — and woke up on the front page of The New York Times. Fifteen years later he became the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic, and his televised Young People's Concerts went on to introduce millions of children to classical music. All his life he was torn between conducting other people's masterpieces and composing his own; the tension gave the world West Side Story, Candide, On the Town and the Chichester Psalms — music that swings between jazz, Broadway and the symphonic tradition without ever losing its voice.
Bernstein and Prague
Prague heard Bernstein before London, Paris or Vienna did. In May 1946, aged just 27, he made his European conducting debut at the very first Prague Spring festival, leading the Czech Philharmonic in a city still celebrating the end of the war. The young American and the Czech orchestra were a sensation — the start of a lifelong love affair between Bernstein and European audiences. Today his melodies return to Prague's concert halls, where the songs of West Side Story sit happily alongside the classics he spent his life championing.