Leonard Bernstein
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"Leonard Bernstein" was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America 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 (1950 musical)/Peter Pan, Candide (operetta)/Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town (musical)/On the Town, On The Waterfront, and his own Mass (Bernstein)/Mass.

Bernstein was the first conductor to give numerous 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.

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 commercial success of West Side Story.

If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous composers! More Leonard Bernstein on Wikipedia.

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

It was an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn . . . as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition - that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else.

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.

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing. To know music.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

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

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

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.

"Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace."