Word: bernsteining
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...straight across the academic boards, and laid down a strong foundation of culture to support his musical taste. He also found time to play the piano for silent movies at the student film club, tried out?but was rejected?for the job of second Glee Club accompanist (years later Bernstein, who never forgets, came to Harvard to conduct the Glee Club; during rehearsal he turned to one of the two pianists and said: "You have the job I wasn't good enough...
After Harvard, Lennie vainly tried to find a musical job, even hung out his shingle as a piano teacher ("No pupils," he recalls). But Fritz Reiner, then at Philadelphia's famed Curtis Institute of Music, was impressed by a dazzling Bernstein audition, took him on as a student in conducting. But it was in the late Serge Koussevitzky. the Boston Symphony Orchestra's matchless showman, that Bernstein found his musical father. Koussevitzky invited him to join the conducting class at Tanglewood's summer music school. The old man called him Lenyush ka, and told friends...
...Tchaikovsky. Bernstein was the sensation of Tanglewood that year (1940). One day a famous actress saw him conduct. "Dahling!" she husked at him later. "I've gone mad about your back muscles. You must come and have dinner with me." Then there were some difficult decisions to make. Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky. himself a Jew, and rather sensitive, begged Lennie to change his unglamorous name so that his way to success would not be blocked by antiSemitism. Lennie said: "I'll do it as Bernstein...
...live in a nine-room duplex just cater-cornered from Carnegie Hall. But Lennie's fierce energy makes it hard for him to relax; when he plays with the children, reports Felicia, "he plays too hard, throws them too high, squeezes them too tight." For all his "settling down." Bernstein has not noticeably slowed his pace. He seems to feel that he is still living the overture. "We still sit up nights." says an old friend, "and talk about what we'll do when we grow...
...Bernstein knows that "in the next year or two. when I grow up, I'll have to decide what to do. It used to come so easy. Now I get tired." The wonder boy has become the man who wonders...