Leonard Bernstein was arguably the most highly esteemed,
influential, and charismatic American classical music personality
of the twentieth century. Conductor, composer, pianist, writer,
educator, and human rights activist, Bernstein truly led a life of
Byronic intensity-passionate, risk-taking, and convention-breaking.
In November 1989, just a year before his death, Bernstein invited
writer Jonathan Cott to his country home in Fairfield, Connecticut
for what turned out to be his last major interview-an unprecedented
and astonishingly frank twelve-hour conversation. Now, in Dinner
with Lenny, Cott provides a complete account of this remarkable
dialogue in which Bernstein discourses with disarming frankness,
humor, and intensity on matters musical, pedagogical, political,
psychological, spiritual, and the unabashedly personal. Bernstein
comes alive again, with vodka glass in hand, singing, humming, and
making pointed comments on a wide array of topics, from popular
music ("the Beatles were the best songwriters since Gershwin"), to
great composers ("Wagner was always in a psychotic frenzy. He was a
madman, a megalomaniac"), and politics (lamenting "the
brainlessness, the mindlessness, the carelessness, and the
heedlessness of the Reagans of the world"). And of course,
Bernstein talks of conducting, advising students "to look at the
score and make it come alive as if they were the composer. If you
can do that, you're a conductorand if you can't, you're not. If I
don't become Brahms or Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky when I'm
conducting their works, then it won't be a great performance."
After Rolling Stone magazine published an abridged version of the
conversation in 1990, the Chicago Tribune praised it as "an
extraordinary interview" filled with "passion, wit, and acute
analysis." Studs Terkel called the interview "astonishing and
revelatory." Now, this full-length version provides the reader with
a unique, you-are-there perspective on what it was like to converse
with this gregarious, witty, candid, and inspiring American dynamo.
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