Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernsteinwas an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the US to receive worldwide acclaim. According to music critic Donal Henahan, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth25 August 1918
CityLawrence, MA
CountryUnited States of America
Leonard Bernstein quotes about
Life without music is unthinkable.
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Any great art work … 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.
It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.
Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
When the thunder rumbles, Now the age of gold is dead. When the dreams we've clung to Trying to stay young, Have left us parched and old instead. When my courage crumbles, When I feel confused and frail, When my spirit falters on decaying altars And my illusions fail -- I go on right then. I go on again. I go on to say I will celebrate another day. I go on. If tomorrow tumbles And everything I love is gone, I will face regret all my days, and yet I will still go on.
When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.
It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.