Leonard Bernstein was one of twentieth-century music’s most successful and recognizable figures. In a career spanning five decades, he conducted many of the world’s leading orchestras and composed scores for landmark musicals such as West Side Story. With an iron self-belief, he negotiated risky and challenging musical situations that resulted in always passionate, if sometimes mixed, reviews. Published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Bernstein’s birth, this engaging new biography provides a concise overview of the life and work of a prodigiously talented, endlessly enthralling, and controversial musician.

Drawing on more than thirty years of study, leading Bernstein scholar Paul R. Laird describes Bernstein’s work as a conductor, composer, music educator, and commentator, evaluating all of his major compositions. Laird also explores the impact of Bernstein’s complicated personal life on his professional work, including his homosexuality and many affairs with men, and his strong yet difficult marriage. Featuring original insights into Bernstein’s life and work, including information gleaned from a 1982 interview with Bernstein, Laird’s book is the ideal introduction to Bernstein’s eclectic musical style and complex character, showing how both fit within the larger world of twentieth-century music.

Leonard Bernstein's gifts for drama and connecting with popular audiences made him a central figure in twentieth century American music. Though a Bernstein work might reference anything from modernism to cartoon ditties, jazz permeated every part of his musical identity as a performer, educator, and intellectual. Katherine Baber investigates how jazz in its many styles served Bernstein as a flexible, indeed protean, musical idea. As she shows, Bernstein used jazz to signify American identity with all its tensions and contradictions and to articulate community and conflict, irony and parody, and timely issues of race and gender. Baber provides a thoughtful look at how Bernstein's use of jazz grew out of his belief in the primacy of tonality, music's value as a unique form of human communication, and the formation of national identity in music. She also offers in-depth analyses of On the Town, West Side Story, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and other works to explore fascinating links between Bernstein's art and issues like eclecticism, music's relationship to social engagement, black-Jewish relations, and his own musical identity.