Leonard Bernstein was born in 1918 in Lawrence, Massachussetts to a family of Ukranian-Jewish immigrants. His father, Samuel, ran a hair salon in Boston, which by the end of the 1920s was prosperous enough to provide a comfortable living for the family. At the age of 8, young Leonard began studying Hebrew intensively after school. He began private piano lessons the following year, and two years later entered the New England Conservatory. In 1932, he began taking additional lessons to perfect his technique with Helen Coates, who would later become his personal secretary. Upon completing high school at Boston Public Latin School (1929-1935), he enrolled at Harvard College (1935-1939), where he studied with Walter Piston, Edward Burlingame Hill, and Arthur Tillman Merritt. In 1939, he entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied piano with Isabella Vengerova, conducting with Fritz Reiner, and orchestration with Randall Thomson. He considered a career as a concert pianist, but had a strong interest in conducting and composition, as well. While still at Harvard, he wrote and conducted the music for a production of Aristophane’s The Birds and mounted a production of Marc Blitztein’s The Cradle Will Rock, which he conducted from the piano.

In 1940, Bernstein attended the Tanglewood Music Center (then the Berkshire Music Center), the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home, where he studied conducting with Serge Koussevitski, for whom he would work as an assistant in the ensuing years. Bernstein then moved to Manhattan, where he earned a living playing piano as an accompanist to dancers and singers; he also transcribed jazz improvisations and composed songs. In 1943, he completed work on Symphony n°1, Jeremiah, which received the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award for best American composition. He was hired as chief assistant conductor to Arthur Rodzinski at the New York Philharmonic, for whom he gave his first performance on 14 November 1943, stepping in for guest conductor Bruno Walter. The year 1944 saw his first wide successes, with his ballet Fancy Free, which premiered at the New York Metropolitan Opera and his musical On the Town, which was performed on Broadway.

From 1945 to 1947, Bernstein served as the musical director of the New York City Symphony Orchestra. He began making a broader name for himself in the United States and abroad in 1946, when he first toured Europe, conducting the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra at the Prague International Music Festival. In 1947, he gave a series of concerts in Tel Aviv, marking the beginning of a long musical collaboration with Israeli artists. In 1949, he completed his Symphony n°2, The Age of Anxiety, for piano and orchestra. At the death of Serge Koussevitski in 1951, Bernstein took over as head of the orchestra and conducting departments at Tanglewood, where he would teach for many years. In the early 1950s, Bernstein was also a visiting professor of music and director of the Creative Arts Festival of Brandeis University. In 1951, he married the Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre, with whom he subsequently had three children, despite his homosexuality, which he did less and less to hide beginning in the 1970s. In 1951 he composed his first opera, Trouble in Tahiti (broadcast by NBC television in 1952), to which he added a suite, A Quiet Place, in 1983. In 1953, he became the first American conductor to conduct at La Scala in Milan (Cherubini’s Médea, with Maria Callas). The following year, Bernstein presented his first musical lecture series for television on the show Omnibus. From 1958 to 1973, with the New York Philharmonic, he conducted the “Young People’s Concerts” series, which was broadcast by CBS starting in 1962. He composed the first version of his operetta of Voltaire’s Candide in 1956. In 1957, he composed West Side Story, a musical based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which was a huge public success, first on broadway and then in a film adaptation by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise in 1961. In 1958, he became the first American conductor to be named music director of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held until 1969. When he stepped down from the post, the orchestra appointed him as a “Laureate Conductor” - an honor that had never been given before. Bernstein left his position with the New York Philharmonic for an international career as a guest conductor, collaborating with many prestigious ensembles including the Vienna Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestre National de France. He also frequently performed concertos as a pianist. In 1959, Bernstein published The Joy of Music, followed by The Infinite Variety of Music in 1966, and Findings in 1982. In 1972-1973, he delivered the Harvard University Norton Lectures, which were published and broadcast on television with the title “The Unanswered Question.”

Bernstein also continued his prolific composing career. In 1963, he composed Symphonie n°3, Kaddish in memory of President John F. Kennedy. Two years later, in 1965, he completed Chichester Psalms. For the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, Bernstein composed Mass, a theater piece for singers, actors, and dancers, which premiered in 1971. The work, which was considered blasphemous at that time, was performed at the Vatican in 2000 at the request of Pope John-Paul II. In the following years he composed, among other pieces, Songfest, a cycle of songs for six vocalists and orchestra (1977), Divertimento for orchestra (1980), Halil, for solo flute and small orchestra (1981), Missa Brevis, for vocalists and percussion (1988), Thirteen Anniversaries for solo piano (1988), and Concerto for orchestra “Jubilee Games” (1986-1989).

Bernstein participated in the Berlin Celebration Concert in December 1989 to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (“Ode to Joy”) with an orchestra composed of musicians from the four occupied zones. He modified Schiller’s poem for the occasion, replacing the word “Freude” (joy) with the word “Freiheit” (freedom). Bernstein’s health was declining rapidly by this time, requiring him to cut back on his work. In the summer of 1990, he and Michael Tilson Thomas founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo (Japan); he conducted his last Tanglewood concert on 19 August. He died of a heart attack caused by mesothelioma on 14 October 1990, at the age of 72. Over the course of his career, Leonard Bernstein received numerous awards and honors, making him America’s best-loved and most highly honored composer, alongside George Gershwin and Aaron Copland.