Leonard Bernstein — composer (west side story) with roots in the Russian Empire
Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on 25 August 1918, the eldest child of Samuel Bernstein and Jennie Resnick, Jewish emigrants from the Rovno region of Volhynia, then in the Russian Empire and now in western Ukraine. His father had come to America as a teenager, worked his way up from cleaning fish in New York, and built a successful beauty-supply business in Boston. He did not at first want his son to be a musician.
Bernstein studied at Harvard, graduating in 1939, then at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Fritz Reiner, and at Tanglewood with Serge Koussevitzky, the Russian-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, who became his mentor. On 14 November 1943, as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he stepped in at a few hours' notice for the ailing Bruno Walter in a nationally broadcast concert, and became famous overnight.
He worked across every field of music. His Broadway scores include On the Town (1944), Candide (1956) and West Side Story (1957); his concert works include the Jeremiah and Kaddish symphonies, the Chichester Psalms and Mass (1971). In 1958 he became music director of the New York Philharmonic, the first American-born conductor to hold the post, and stayed until 1969. His televised Young People's Concerts introduced classical music to millions.
In 1959 he took the New York Philharmonic on a tour of the Soviet Union, where, in Moscow, he met Boris Pasternak. He later conducted the Vienna Philharmonic and the major orchestras of Europe and Israel, with which he had a long association, and championed the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. In 1973 he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, published as The Unanswered Question.
At Christmas 1989, weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in East and West Berlin with musicians from both German states and the four occupying powers, changing the word "Freude" in Schiller's text to "Freiheit".
He retired from conducting in October 1990 and died in New York five days later, on 14 October 1990, aged seventy-two. He received eleven Emmy Awards and the Kennedy Center Honors.
"Samuel Bernstein emigrated from Rovno, Russian Empire, to Boston circa 1908–1913."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Rivne (Ukraine)
His parents, Samuel Bernstein and Jennie Resnick, were Jewish emigrants from the Rovno (Rivne) region of Volhynia, then in the Russian Empire, who settled in Massachusetts.
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Rivne (Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.