I was raised in a musical home. My mother was a concert pianist, my father was a music lover and Chopin, Debussy, Brahms and Mozart provided the soundtrack of my childhood. In 1957, my parents brought home the cast album from the original production of West Side Story. We played it over and over. Here was something very new: a musical tragedy told through a marriage of disparate harmonies and rhythms—classical, Tin Pan Alley, Puertorriqueño and Cubano—composed by a young artist whose career had already attained legendary proportions.
From virtually his first success as a conductor, Leonard Bernstein was omnipresent as a cultural figure, a titan of classical music, a revolutionary on Broadway, a pioneer in the use of television to educate and electrify the young. Watching him on CBS’s Omnibus, my sisters and I were transfixed by Bernstein’s charisma, his extraordinary erudition and his ability to convey to his audiences his marrow-deep passion for music, his thrilling ability to connect his chosen art form to other forms of human expression and to humanity itself. He made being an artist seem primal and glamorous, and he made the case that art was as essential to life as air and water.
And Leonard Bernstein was a Jew, of the generation of Jewish artists who refused to hide their Jewishness. Bernstein’s mentor Serge Koussevitzky implored him to call himself Leonard Burns, warning him that no American orchestra would hire a conductor with a Jewish-sounding name. Bernstein responded, “I have decided to make it as Leonard Bernstein or not at all.” The emergence,
