Word: bernsteins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Samuel Bernstein, the son of a Hasidic scholar, fled Russia when he was 16, to escape both the Czar's draft and the ghetto life. In New York City, in 1910, he found a job cleaning fish underneath the Brook lyn Bridge, for $1 a day. After a while he managed to get himself "in hair" ? he worked in a wigworks that made "rats" and "transformations." By the time Lennie was born, Sam had moved to Boston's Allston section and was building a prosperous business of his own as a beauty-parlor supplier...
Everybody told Sam Bernstein that his boy was a born musician?which was exactly what Sam was afraid of. He thought of the musicians he had known as a boy in Russia as klezmer, the ghetto pagliacci, living from one free meal to the next, and he shuddered for his son's future...
...straight across the academic boards, and laid down a strong foundation of culture to support his musical taste. He also found time to play the piano for silent movies at the student film club, tried out?but was rejected?for the job of second Glee Club accompanist (years later Bernstein, who never forgets, came to Harvard to conduct the Glee Club; during rehearsal he turned to one of the two pianists and said: "You have the job I wasn't good enough...
After Harvard, Lennie vainly tried to find a musical job, even hung out his shingle as a piano teacher ("No pupils," he recalls). But Fritz Reiner, then at Philadelphia's famed Curtis Institute of Music, was impressed by a dazzling Bernstein audition, took him on as a student in conducting. But it was in the late Serge Koussevitzky. the Boston Symphony Orchestra's matchless showman, that Bernstein found his musical father. Koussevitzky invited him to join the conducting class at Tanglewood's summer music school. The old man called him Lenyush ka, and told friends...
...Tchaikovsky. Bernstein was the sensation of Tanglewood that year (1940). One day a famous actress saw him conduct. "Dahling!" she husked at him later. "I've gone mad about your back muscles. You must come and have dinner with me." Then there were some difficult decisions to make. Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky. himself a Jew, and rather sensitive, begged Lennie to change his unglamorous name so that his way to success would not be blocked by antiSemitism. Lennie said: "I'll do it as Bernstein...