Leonard Bernstein

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Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist.

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• The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together – with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky… but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.
  • Of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue
  • "Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?", in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1955.

• 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.
  • "What Makes Opera Grand?", Vogue (December 1958)

• Callas? She was pure electricity.
  • As quoted in Callas : The Art and the Life (1974) by John Ardoin

• Einstein said that 'the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious'. So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?
  • The Unanswered Question (1976)

• The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world.
  • Ned Rorem, Paris Diary (1966)

[edit] About

• Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years.
  • Oscar Levant, Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965)

• Today, he uses music as an accompaniment to his conducting.
  • Oscar Levant, Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965)

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