Biography
Leonard Bernstein was born in 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and was one of the most dazzling personalities of the twentieth-century music world. With West Side Story he created in 1957 a musical that transposed Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the streets of New York and burst the boundary between musical and opera. As the first American-born chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he shaped post-war musical life like no other. His Young People's Concerts made classical music accessible to a million-strong audience and are considered a milestone of music education. Bernstein was equally successful as composer, conductor, pianist, and educator — a versatility unmatched in music history. His political engagement, particularly against the Vietnam War and for the civil rights movement, made him also a societal voice. Bernstein died in 1990 in New York.
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