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Leonard Bernstein Quotes

Leonard Bernstein was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the U.S. to receive worldwide acclaim. According to music critic Donal Henahan, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, Peter Pan, Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town, On the Waterfront, his Mass, and a range of other compositions, including three symphonies and many shorter chamber and solo works.

Bernstein was the first conductor to give a series of television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. He was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard. He was also a critical figure in the modern revival of the music of Gustav Mahler, the composer in which he was most passionately interested.As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and critical success of West Side Story. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. August 1918 – 14. October 1990
Leonard Bernstein photo

Works
The Joy of Music
Leonard Bernstein
The Unanswered Question
The Unanswered Question
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein: 17   quotes 31   likes

Famous Leonard Bernstein Quotes

“A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.”

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein, statement of 1953, quoted in A Wonderful Life : 50 Eulogies to Lift the Spirit (2006) by Cyrus M. Copeland, p. 190

“Any great work of art … 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.”

Leonard Bernstein

"What Makes Opera Grand?", Vogue (December 1958)

“Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein Quotes about music

“Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.”

Leonard Bernstein

The Cambridge Companion to Conducting p. 16.

“So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?”

Leonard Bernstein The Unanswered Question

The Unanswered Question (1976)
Context: Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?

“Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning… except its own.”

Leonard Bernstein book The Joy of Music

Source: The Joy of Music

“This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.”

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein Quotes

“The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy … I don't dare continue.”

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein: The Gift Of Music

War , World

“The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky… but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.”

Leonard Bernstein

Of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue
"Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?", in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1955.

Thinking , Water , Past

“The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world.”

Leonard Bernstein

Ned Rorem, Paris Diary (1966)

Love , World , Personality

“I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”

Leonard Bernstein

Source: The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

Question

“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.”

Leonard Bernstein
Time , Waiting

“To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation.”

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein, "Leonard Bernstein discusses material & structure in Bach's St. Matthew Passion," Bernstein Century - Bach: St. Matthew Passion / Nypo, Et Al (1999) (at 6:31)

“Callas? She was pure electricity.”

Leonard Bernstein

As quoted in Callas: The Art and the Life (1974) by John Ardoin

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