Maestro, directed by Bradley Cooper, 2023.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN pursued so many simultaneous careers that he's one twentieth-century American artist of whom it can be said without exaggeration that he contained multitudes. His break-through occurred when he was twenty-five: he was substituted at the last minute for the ailing Bruno Walter, leading the New York Philharmonic—without the benefit of a rehearsal—at a 1943 Carnegie Hall matinee that was broadcast live on radio. After that, Serge Koussevitzky, his conducting mentor, encouraged him to leave Broadway behind if he wanted to become a truly important force in the classical music world. But he never did. He wrote music for the ballet, the Broadway stage, the movies, and the concert hall. He was the first celebrity American conductor, notably responsible for introducing U.S. audiences to the glories of Gustav Mahler, whose entire cycle of nine symphonies he was the first to record. He not only performed at Tanglewood for nearly half a century but taught and mentored young musicians there, and he drew more than one generation of children to classical music through his televised between 1958 and 1972. He was fantastically popular, with a magnetic personality and a dynamic, impassioned approach to the podium that made him mesmerizing to watch as well as to listen to. And he paid for his fame and his charisma and his refusal to stay on a single path. He attracted increasingly mean-spirited criticism as he grew older (he died at seventy-two in 1990); his , which premiered at the Kennedy Center
