Music Was It: Young Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein---composer of West Side Story and Chichester Psalms, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and accomplished concert pianist---always knew his life would be about music.

But his father, a successful businessman, wanted Lenny to follow in his footsteps. Music was no career, he said---music was for klezmers. Besides, classical music in the 1930s and 1940s was dominated by Europeans. No American Jewish kid had a serious chance to make a name for himself in this field.

Beginning with Lenny's childhood in Boston and ending with his triumphant conducting debut at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic when he was just twenty-five, Music Was IT draws readers into the energetic, passionate, challenging, music-filled life of young Leonard Bernstein.

Includes a foreword by Bernstein's older daughter, Jamie Bernstein.