Featured Work
Symphony No. 3: Kaddish (1963)
In his Kaddish Symphony, Leonard Bernstein exploits the dualistic overtones of the prayer: its popular connotation as a kind of requiem, and its celebration of life ( i.e. creation). He does this both in his speaker's text and in his music.
The Leonard Bernstein Office Mission
The Leonard Bernstein Office (LBO) sustains and strengthens Leonard Bernstein’s legacy by inspiring global engagement with his work as a composer, conductor, educator, and humanitarian. Through licensing, promotion, music editing, and publishing, the LBO strives to communicate his lifelong devotion to the transformative power and joy of music.
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Thus Spake Leonard Bernstein:
"I want to conduct. I want to play the piano. I want to write for Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can still do justice to them all. But I can’t do them all at once.
I have to learn to do one at a time, and to give it all my strength until I’ve done it right. Mozart, Mendelssohn, Bach, Haydn -- they were all performers and conductors as well as composers, and they did a lot of other things too. Only then, there was time."
Leonard Bernstein, 1957