Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listener's Companion

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Series Editor
Foreword
Acknowledgments Timeline
Introduction
Chapter 1 : Father, Son, and Music
Chapter 2 : Celebrity
Chapter 3 : Age of Anxiety
Chapter 4 : Trouble In Tahiti and Wonderful Town
Chapter 5 : On The Waterfront and Serenade After Plato's Symposium
Chapter 6 : Candide
Chapter 7 : West Side Story
Chapter 8 : Kaddish and Chichester Psalms
Chapter 9 : Mass and the Norton Lectures
Chapter 10 : Last Works And Legacy Selected Reading Selected Listening
Index About the Author

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About

Leonard Bernstein is a household name. Most know him for his classic musical reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as Broadway’s West Side Story. But Bernstein accomplished so much more as a composer, and his body of work is both broad and varied. He composed ballets (Fancy Free, Facsimile, Dybbuk), operas (Trouble in Tahiti, Candide, A Quiet Place), musicals (On the Town, Wonderful Town), film scores (On the Waterfront), symphonies, choral works, chamber music pieces, art songs, and piano works. In Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listener’s Companion, Kenneth LaFave guides readers past Bernstein’s famously tortured personal problems and into the clarity and balance of his Serenade after Plato’s Symposium for Violin and Orchestra, the intense drama of his music for On the Waterfront, the existential cosmography of his three symphonies, and his vibrant works for the musical stage. Perhaps the most famous American classical musician born in the twentieth century, Bernstein divided his time between composing, conducting, writing, and teaching, a busy schedule—especially his conducting of major orchestras—that set his work as composer at a disadvantage. Often generated in short spurts, his work carries an urgency—and even an element of improvisational genius—that he flavored with his eclectic embrace of jazz, folk song, Jewish cantorial music, and innovations in contemporary classical theory. The result is a body of work that is beguilingly melodic, incomparably rhythmic, and irrepressibly individual. Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listener’s Companion is the ideal work for any reader seeking to learn how to listen across the spectrum of Bernstein’s musical output.

Reviews

The premise of this book is that one experiences Leonard Bernstein largely through his own compositions, and Kenneth LaFave makes it clear that this was a view of himself Bernstein cherished. There is no shortage of available biographical material for and studies of the most-publicized American musician of the second half of the last century and, though LaFave explicitly says this is not a biography, he equally explicitly says one cannot understand Bernstein's music without some knowledge of that biography, and that is what he undertakes here. Each piece he discusses is given its biographical position and its interpretation as a reflection of Bernstein's thought and life at that moment. In LaFave's telling, the composer Bernstein was intimately bound up with the person Bernstein, and that union was expressed by 'faith,' perhaps the most-common descriptive word in this book, and the word LaFave works hardest to give content to. . . .LaFave's prose is everywhere effusive and ebullient

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