"Where truth with beauty meets," Leonard Bernstein wrote as he neared his 70th birthday, is home to that over-used, four-letter word -- "I cringe to say it" -- called, love.
Academy award-winning actor Jeremy Irons reads Leonard Bernstein's poem, a negotiation with a gender-changing God, penned six months before his death.
These two Leonard Bernstein poems from 1939 and 1990 reveal a lifetime of longing for knowledge and meaning from everything: from a bar of soap to battling cancer. Read:
Written in Hebrew for his teacher in Tel Aviv, "Poem for Yom Kippur," captures Leonard Bernstein's devotion to, and struggle with, his Jewish identity. Actress Laila Robins reads.
"Did I tell you how we met on his birthday?" Bernstein says to the interviewer. "Oh, I must have!" Listen to Lenny tell the story of meeting Aaron Copland, only on Classical.org. (Plus, read the sonnet he wrote for Aaron's 80th birthday!)
Though not all of them are masterpieces, Bernstein's "so-called poems" for a teenage sweetheart are clear flashes of brilliance from a young man with a lifelong love of language.
Leonard Bernstein was a man of many words. Start here as you explore this curated collection of Bernstein's poetry, letters, and other writings.
Actor Jeremy Irons reads "Life is Juicy," a poem written by Leonard Bernstein in 1947 "on the mucky shore" of a lake near Tanglewood.
"These last six weeks have been the happiest and most productive of my life," writes twenty-two-year-old Leonard Bernstein to Serge Koussevitzky, following a momentous summer at Tanglewood Music Festival in 1940.
