ABSTRACT
Leonard Bernstein was a man filled with a love for life and all that it could offer him. His passion for music inspired him to reach out to audiences through his conducting, performing, teaching, writing, television programmes and, of course, through his compositions. Bernstein's musical studies took him to Harvard in 1935 and, although the education provided there was more theoretical than practical, Bernstein created his own opportunities for creativity. There is a duality in Bernstein's music, a tension between the highbrow and the lowbrow, paralleled by the dichotomy between the two most prominent sides of his musical persona: the conductor and the composer. For his final project at Harvard, Bernstein produced Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, and invited the composer, who duly attended, and the two formed a friendship that lasted until the older composer's death in 1964.
