Louis Comfort Tiffany
c.1908
Born	(1848-02-18)February 18, 1848 New York, New York
Died	January 17, 1933(1933-01-17) (aged 84) New York, New York
Resting place	Green-Wood Cemetery
Education	Pennsylvania Military Academy Eagleswood Military Academy
Known for	Favrile glass
Spouse	Mary Woodbridge Goddard (c1850-1884)
Parents	Charles Lewis Tiffany Harriet Olivia Avery Young

Louis Comfort Tiffany (February 18, 1848 – January 17, 1933) was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau ^[1] and Aesthetic movements. Tiffany was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewelery, enamels and metalwork.^[2]

Tiffany's painting depicting a market outside of the walls of Tangier

The Entrance Hall of the White House in 1882, showing the newly installed Tiffany glass screens.

Early life[link]

Tiffany was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany and Company; and Harriet Olivia Avery Young. He attended school at Pennsylvania Military Academy^[3] in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Eagleswood Military Academy in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. His first artistic training was as a painter, studying under George Inness and Samuel Colman in New York City and Léon Bailly in Paris.

Career[link]

Tiffany started out as a painter, but became interested in glassmaking from about 1875 and worked at several glasshouses in Brooklyn between then and 1878. In 1879, he joined with Candace Wheeler, Samuel Colman and Lockwood de Forest to form Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated American Artists. Tiffany's leadership and talent, as well as his father's money and connections, led this business to thrive.

In 1881 Tiffany did the interior design of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, which still remains, but the new firm's most notable work came in 1882 when President Chester Alan Arthur refused to move into the White House until it had been redecorated. He commissioned Tiffany, who had begun to make a name for himself in New York society for the firm's interior design work, to redo the state rooms, which Arthur found charmless. Tiffany worked on the East Room, the Blue Room, the Red Room, the State Dining Room and the Entrance Hall, refurnishing, repainting in decorative patterns, installing newly designed mantelpieces, changing to wallpaper with dense patterns and, of course, adding Tiffany glass to gaslight fixtures, windows and adding the opalescent floor to ceiling glass screen in the Entrance Hall.^[4][5][6]

A desire to concentrate on art in glass led to the breakup of the firm in 1885 when Tiffany chose to establish his own glassmaking firm that same year. The first Tiffany Glass Company was incorporated December 1, 1885 and in 1902 became known as the Tiffany Studios.

In the beginning of his career, Tiffany used cheap jelly jars and bottles because they had the mineral impurities that finer glass lacked. When he was unable to convince fine glassmakers to leave the impurities in, he began making his own glass. Tiffany used opalescent glass in a variety of colors and textures to create a unique style of stained glass. This can be contrasted with the method of painting in enamels or glass paint on colorless glass that had been the dominant method of creating stained glass for hundred of years in Europe. (The First Presbyterian Church building of 1905 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is unique in that it uses Tiffany windows that partially make use of painted glass.) Use of the colored glass itself to create stained glass pictures was motivated by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and its leader William Morris in England. Fellow artists and glassmakers Oliver Kimberly and Frank Duffner, founders of the Duffner and Kimberly Company and John La Farge were Tiffany's chief competitors in this new American style of stained glass. Tiffany, Duffner and Kimberly, along with La Farge, had learned their craft at the same glasshouses in Brooklyn in the late 1870s.

In 1889 at the Paris Exposition, he is said to have been "Overwhelmed" by the glass work of Émile Gallé, French Art Nouveau artisan.^[7]

In 1893, Tiffany built a new factory called the Stourbridge Glass Company, later called Tiffany Glass Furnaces, which was located in Corona, Queens, New York. In 1893, his company also introduced the term Favrile in conjunction with his first production of blown glass at his new glass factory. Some early examples of his lamps were exhibited in the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. At the Exposition Universelle (1900) in Paris, he won a gold medal with his stained glass windows The Four Seasons

Tiffany Studios Daffodil stained glass leaded lampshade, now known to be one of head designer Clara Driscoll's creations

Close-up of a Tiffany Studios "Venetian" desk lamp, c.1910-1920

Louis Comfort Tiffany (far left) with his parents (seated), pictured holding Tiffany's twin daughters Louise and Julia

He trademarked Favrile (from the old French word for handmade) on November 13, 1894. He later used this word to apply to all of his glass, enamel and pottery. Tiffany's first commercially produced lamps date from around 1895. Much of his company's production was in making stained glass windows and Tiffany lamps, but his company designed a complete range of interior decorations. At its peak, his factory employed more than 300 artisans. Recent scholarship led by Rutgers professor Martin Eidelberg suggests that a team of talented single women designers led by Clara Driscoll played a big role in designing many of the floral patterns on the famous Tiffany lamp as well as for other creations.^{[8][9][10][11][12]}

Tiffany interiors also made considerable use of mosaics. The mosaics workshop, largely staffed by women, was overseen until 1898 by the Swiss-born sculptor and designer Jacob Adolphus Holzer.

In 1902, Tiffany became the first Design Director for Tiffany & Co., the jewelry company founded by his father.^[13]

1911 saw the installation of an enormous glass curtain fabricated for the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. It is considered by some to be a masterpiece.^[7]

Tiffany used all his skills in the design of his own house, the 84-room Laurelton Hall, in the village of Laurel Hollow, on Long Island, New York completed in 1905. Later this estate was donated to his foundation for art students along with 60 acres (243,000 m²) of land, sold in 1949, and destroyed by a fire in 1957.

Family[link]

Louis married Mary Woodbridge Goddard (c1850-1884) on May 15, 1872 in Norwich, Connecticut and had the following children:

• Mary Woodbridge Tiffany (1873–1963) who married Graham Lusk;
• Charles Louis Tiffany I (1874-1874);
• Charles Louis Tiffany II (1878–1947); and
• Hilda Goddard Tiffany (1879–1908), the youngest.

After the death of his wife, he married Louise Wakeman Knox (1851–1904) on November 9, 1886. They had the following children:

• Louise Comfort Tiffany (1887–1974), who married Rodman Drake DeKay Gilder;
• Julia DeForest Tiffany (1887–1973), who married Gurdon S. Parker then married Francis Minot Weld;^[14]
• Annie Olivia Tiffany (1888–1892); and
• Dorothy Trimble Tiffany (1891–1979), who, as Dorothy Burlingham, later became a noted psychoanalyst and lifelong friend and partner of Anna Freud.

Death[link]

The Holy City (1905) – St. John's vision on the isle of Patmos, one of eleven Tiffany windows at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland. It has 58 panels and is thought to be one of the largest Tiffany Studios windows

Tiffany died on January 17, 1933, and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.^[15]

Societies[link]

• American Watercolor Society
• Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1900
• National Academy of Design in 1880
• Societé des Beaux Arts
• Society of American Artists in 1877

Collections[link]

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida houses the world's most comprehensive collection of the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany, including Tiffany jewelry, pottery, paintings, art glass, leaded-glass windows, lamps, and the Tiffany Chapel he designed for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. After the close of the exposition, a benefactor purchased the entire chapel for installation in the crypt of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York in New York City. As construction on the cathedral continued, the chapel fell into disuse, and in 1916, Tiffany removed the bulk of it to Laurelton Hall. After the 1957 fire, the chapel was rescued by Hugh McKean,^[16] a former art student in 1930 at Laurelton Hall, and his wife Jeannette Genius McKean,^[17] and now occupies an entire wing of the Morse Museum which they founded. Many glass panels from Laurelton Hall are also there; for many years some were on display in local restaurants and businesses in Central Florida. Some were replaced by full-scale color transparencies after the museum opened.

A major exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on Laurelton Hall opened in November 2006. An exhibit at the New-York Historical Society in 2007 featured new information about the women who worked for Tiffany and their contribution to designs credited to Tiffany.^[18] In addition, since 1995 the Queens Museum of Art has featured a permanent collection of Tiffany objects, which continues Tiffany’s presence in Corona, Queens where the company's studios were once located. Reid Memorial Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Indiana has a collection of 62 Tiffany windows which are still their original placements, but the church is deteriorating and is jeopardy.

Significant collections of Tiffany windows outside the United States are the 17 windows in the former Erskine and American United Church, now part of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Canada,^[19] and the two windows in the American Church in Paris, on the Quai d'Orsay, which have been classified as National Monuments by the French government; these were commissioned by Rodman Wanamaker in 1901 for the original American Church building on the right bank of the Seine.

The Haworth Art Gallery in Accrington, England^[20] contains a collection of over 140 examples of the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, including vases, tiles, lamps and mosaics. The collection, which claims to be the largest collection of publicly owned Tiffany glass outside of the United States, contains a fine example of an Aquamarine vase and the noted Sulphur Crested Cockatoos mosaic.

Gallery[link]

See also[link]

References[link]

Notes

Sources

• Tiffany, Louis Comfort & de Kay, Charles. The Art Work of Louis C. Tiffany. Doubleday, Page & Co, New York, 1916

Further reading

• Couldrey, Vivienne. The Art of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Bloomsbury Publications, London, 1989, ISBN 0-7475-0488-1
• Duncan, Alastair. Tiffany Windows. Thames & Hudson, London, 1980, ISBN 978-0-500-23321-4
• Koch, Robert H. Louis C. Tiffany - Rebel in Glass. 3rd Ed., Crown Publishers Inc, New York, 1982, ASIN B 0007DRJK0
• Logan, Ernest Edwin. The Church That Was Twice Born: A History of the First Presbyterian Church Of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1773-1973. Pickwick-Morcraft, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1973
• Rago, David. "Tiffany Pottery" in American Art Pottery. Knickerbocker Press, New York, 1997
• "Featured Windows, Louis C. Tiffany and Tiffany Studios As Seen Through Michigan Stained Glass Windows". Michigan Stained Glass Census. May-June 2008. http://www.michiganstainedglass.org/month/month.php?month=05&year=2008. Retrieved February 18, 2012. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Louis Comfort Tiffany

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Louis Comfort Tiffany

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Tiffany, Louis Comfort". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• "Winter" one of Tiffany's The Four Seasons windows which won the Gold Medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition
• The Corning Museum of Glass Information on 2009-2010 Tiffany Treasures exhibition
• Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida
• Eight windows in the Euclid Avenue Temple in Cleveland
• Louis Comfort Tiffany - Artist and Businessman
• Louis Comfort Tiffany at Find a Grave
• Louis Comfort Tiffany Pictorial Histories
• Press Release on Metropolitan 2006-07 exhibition about Laurelton Hall
• Tiffany and The Associated Artists' work on the Mark Twain House
• When Louis Tiffany Redesigned the White House
• Tiffany Lamps - Information, Valuation and History.
• Willard Memorial Chapel
• Virtual visit of Tiffany Glass exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2010)]
• Some of the Tiffany windows at Reid Memorial Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Indiana
• (Japanese) Louis C. Tiffany Garden Museum

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can; the talk page may contain suggestions. (May 2007)

Nathan Sawaya (born July 10, 1973), is an artist who builds custom three-dimensional models and large-scale mosaics from popular everyday items and standard Lego toy bricks. His unique art creations are commissioned by companies, charities, individuals, museums and galleries.

Born in Colville, Washington and raised in Veneta, Oregon, Sawaya attended New York University, where he earned bachelors and law degrees, eventually practicing law at the firm Winston & Strawn.

He first came to national attention in 2004, when he won a nationwide search for a professional Lego Master Model Builder.^[1]

After working for the Lego company for six months, he branched off and opened his own art studio in New York and is officially recognized by The Lego Group as a Lego Certified Professional.^[2]

He had his first solo art exhibit in the Spring of 2007 at the Lancaster Museum of Art. "The Art of the Brick" is the first major museum exhibition in the U.S. to focus exclusively on the use of Lego building blocks as an art medium.

In addition, his work is also in collections including:

• The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York
• Time Warner Center public art display in New York, New York
• Qwest Field public art display in Seattle, Washington
• Legoland California in Carlsbad, California
• FAO Schwarz in New York, New York
• The Toy Museum in Bellaire, Ohio
• The Dreier Collection in Santa Barbara, California
• The National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia
• The New Orleans Public Library public art display in New Orleans, Louisiana

Nathan had his first exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere at Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia in June 2011. This exhibition is now travelling around Australia and is due to open in Sydney, Australia at the Sydney Town Hall on December 12th 2011.

Since 2000, Sawaya has created some of the most recognizable LEGO art sculptures, including a 7-foot (2.1 m)-long replica of the Brooklyn Bridge, a life-size tyrannosaurus rex, a 6-foot (1.8 m)-tall Han Solo frozen in carbonite, Curious George, and models of Alfred Hitchcock and Lindsay Lohan. Others include a huge black-and-white self portrait and a gigantic Monopoly box.

Sawaya has also been featured on multiple media outlets including The Colbert Report, where he presented Stephen Colbert with a life size replica of Stephen Colbert; CBS’s The Late Show with David Letterman; NBC’s Today Show; MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann; ESPN’s Cold Pizza; ABC’S Jimmy Kimmel Live; Newsweek; the Los Angeles Times; Hollywood Reporter; CNN; and Newsday. In April 2009, he was a consultant on Mythbusters.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Personal portfolio with descriptions and photos of all building projects.

Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker in her famous banana striptease costume.
Background information
Birth name	Freda Josephine McDonald
Born	(1906-06-03)June 3, 1906 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.[1][2]
Died	April 12, 1975(1975-04-12) (aged 68) Paris, France
Genres	Cabaret, Music hall, French pop, French jazz
Occupations	Dancer, singer, actress, Civil Rights Activist, spy
Instruments	Vocals
Years active	1921–1975
Labels	Columbia, Mercury, RCA Victor
Website	Josephine Baker profile

Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 – April 12, 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress. Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, she became a citizen of France in 1937. Fluent in both English and French, Baker became an international musical and political icon. She was given such nicknames as the "Bronze Venus", the "Black Pearl", and the "Créole Goddess".

Baker was the first African American female to star in a major motion picture,^[which?] to integrate an American concert hall,^{[citation needed]} and to become a world-famous entertainer. She is also noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (she was offered the unofficial leadership of the movement by Coretta Scott King in 1968 following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, but turned it down),^[3] for assisting the French Resistance during World War II,^[4] and for being the first American-born woman to receive the French military honor, the Croix de guerre.

Early life[link]

Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri,^[1][2] the daughter of Carrie McDonald. Her estate identifies vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson as her natural father.^[5] A biography written by her foster son Jean-Claude Baker stated:

… (Josephine Baker's) father was identified (on the birth certificate) simply as "Edw" … I think Josephine's father was white—so did Josephine, so did her family … people in St. Louis say that (Josephine's mother) had worked for a German family (around the time she became pregnant). (Carrie) let people think Eddie Carson was the father, and Carson played along … (but) Josephine knew better.^[6]

Her mother, Carrie, was adopted in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1886 by Richard and Elvira McDonald, both of whom were former slaves of African and Native American descent.^[6] When Baker was eight she was sent to work for a white woman who abused her, burning Baker's hands when she put too much soap in the laundry. She later went to work for another woman.

Baker dropped out of school at the age of 12 and lived as a street child in the slums of St. Louis, sleeping in cardboard shelters and scavenging for food in garbage cans.^[7] Her street-corner dancing attracted attention and she was recruited for the St. Louis Chorus vaudeville show at 15. She then headed to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, performing at the Plantation Club and in the chorus of the popular Broadway revues Shuffle Along (1921) with Adelaide Hall and The Chocolate Dandies (1924). She performed as the last dancer in a chorus line, a position in which the dancer traditionally performed in a comic manner, as if she was unable to remember the dance, until the encore, at which point she would not only perform it correctly, but with additional complexity. Baker was then billed as "the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville".^{[citation needed]}

On October 2, 1925, she opened in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where she became an instant success for her erotic dancing and for appearing practically nude on stage. After a successful tour of Europe, she reneged on her contract and returned to France to star at the Folies Bergères, setting the standard for her future acts. She performed the Danse sauvage, wearing a costume consisting of a skirt made of a string of artificial bananas. Her success coincided (1925) with the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which gave birth to the term "Art Deco", and also with a renewal of interest in ethnic forms of art, including African. Baker represented one aspect of this fashion. In later shows in Paris she was often accompanied on stage by her pet cheetah, Chiquita, who was adorned with a diamond collar. The cheetah frequently escaped into the orchestra pit, where it terrorized the musicians, adding another element of excitement to the show.^{[citation needed]}

Rise to fame[link]

After a short while she was the most successful American entertainer working in France. Ernest Hemingway called her "… the most sensational woman anyone ever saw."^[8][9] In addition to being a musical star, Baker also starred in three films which found success only in Europe: the silent film Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zouzou (1934) and Princesse Tam Tam (1935). She also starred in Fausse Alerte in 1940.

Baker in a topless photo shoot.

At this time she also scored her most successful song, "J'ai deux amours" (1931) and became a muse for contemporary authors, painters, designers, and sculptors including Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior. Under the management of Giuseppe Pepito Abatino — a Sicilian former stonemason who passed himself off as a count — Baker's stage and public persona, as well as her singing voice, were transformed.

In 1934 she took the lead in a revival of Jacques Offenbach's 1875 opera La créole at the Théâtre Marigny on the Champs-Élysées of Paris, which premiered in December of that year for a six month run. In preparation for her performances she went through months of training with a vocal coach. In the words of Shirley Bassey, who has cited Baker as her primary influence, "… she went from a 'petite danseuse sauvage' with a decent voice to 'la grande diva magnifique' … I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer."^{[citation needed]}

Despite her popularity in France, she never obtained the same reputation in America. Upon a visit to the United States in 1935-1936, her performances received poor opening reviews for her starring role in the Ziegfeld Follies and she was replaced by Gypsy Rose Lee later in the run.^{[citation needed]}

Baker returned to Paris in 1937, married a Frenchman, Jean Lion, who was Jewish, and became a French citizen.^[10] They were married in the French city of Crévecoeur le Grand. The wedding was presided over by the mayor at the time, Jammy Schmidt. During the ceremony, when she was asked if she was ready to give up her American citizenship, it has been claimed that she renounced it without difficulty.^{[citation needed]}

Her affection for France was so great that when World War II broke out, she volunteered to spy for her adopted country. Baker's agent's brother approached her about working for the French government as an "honorable correspondent", if she happened to hear any gossip at parties that might be of use to her adopted country, she could report it. Baker immediately agreed, since she was against the Nazi stand on race, not only because she was black but because her husband was Jewish. Her café society fame enabled her to rub shoulders with those in-the-know, from high-ranking Japanese officials to Italian bureaucrats, and report back what she heard. She attended parties at the Italian embassy without any suspicion falling on her and gathered information. She helped in the war effort in other ways, such as by sending Christmas presents to French soldiers. When the Germans invaded France, Baker left Paris and went to the Château des Milandes, her home in the south of France, where she had Belgian refugees living with her and others who were eager to help the Free French effort led from England by Charles de Gaulle. As an entertainer, Baker had an excuse for moving around Europe, visiting neutral nations like Portugal, and returning to France. Baker assisted the French Resistance by smuggling secrets written in invisible ink on her sheet music.^{[citation needed]}

She helped mount a production in Marseille to give herself and her like-minded friends a reason for being there. She helped quite a lot of people who were in danger from the Nazis get visas and passports to leave France. Later in 1941, she and her entourage went to the French colonies in North Africa; the stated reason was Baker's health (since she really was recovering from another case of pneumonia) but the real reason was to continue helping the Resistance. From a base in Morocco, she made tours of Spain and pinned notes with the information she gathered inside her underwear (counting on her celebrity to avoid a strip search) and made friends with the Pasha of Marrakesh, whose support helped her through a miscarriage (the last of several) and emergency hysterectomy she had to go through in 1942. After her recovery, she started touring to entertain Allied soldiers in North Africa. She even persuaded Egypt's King Farouk to make a public appearance at one of her concerts, a subtle indication of which side his officially neutral country leaned toward. Later, she would perform at Buchenwald for the liberated inmates who were too frail to be moved.^{[citation needed]}

After the war, for her underground activity, Baker received the Croix de guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance, and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by General Charles de Gaulle.^[11]

In January 1966, she was invited by Fidel Castro to perform at the Teatro Musical de La Habana in Havana, Cuba. Her spectacular show in April of that year led to record breaking attendance. In 1968, Baker visited Yugoslavia and made appearances in Belgrade and in Skopje. In 1973, Baker opened at Carnegie Hall to a standing ovation. In 1974, she appeared in a Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium.

Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston, 1926

Civil rights activism[link]

Although based in France, Baker supported the American Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s. She protested in her own way against racism, adopting 12 multi-ethnic orphans, whom she called the "Rainbow Tribe."^[12] In addition, she refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States.^[4] Her insistence on mixed audiences helped to integrate shows in Las Vegas, Nevada.^{[citation needed]}

In 1951, Baker made charges of racism against Sherman Billingsley's Stork Club in Manhattan, where she alleged that she'd been refused service.^[13][14] Actress Grace Kelly, who was at the club at the time, rushed over to Baker, took her by the arm and stormed out with her entire party, vowing never to return (and she never did). The two women became close friends after the incident.^[15] Testament to this was made evident when Baker was near bankruptcy and was offered a villa and financial assistance by Kelly (who by then was princess consort of Rainier III of Monaco). (However, during his work on the Stork Club book, author and New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal was contacted by Jean-Claude Baker, one of Josephine Baker's sons. Having read a Blumenthal-written story about Leonard Bernstein's FBI file, he indicated that he had read his mother's FBI file and using comparison of the file to the tapes, said he thought the Stork Club incident was overblown.^[16])

Baker worked with the NAACP.^[4] In 1963, she spoke at the March on Washington at the side of Martin Luther King, Jr.^[17] Baker was the only official female speaker and while wearing her Free French uniform emblazoned with her medal of the Légion d'honneur she introduced the "Negro Women for Civil Rights."^[18] Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates were among those she acknowledged and both gave brief speeches. After King's assassination, his widow Coretta Scott King approached Baker in Holland to ask if she would take her husband's place as leader of the American Civil Rights Movement. After many days of thinking it over, Baker declined, saying her children were "too young to lose their mother".^[3]

Personal life[link]

Baker had 12 children through adoption. She bore only one child herself, stillborn in 1941, an incident which precipitated an emergency hysterectomy. Baker raised two daughters, French-born Marianne and Moroccan-born Stellina, and ten sons, Korean-born Akio, Japanese-born Jeannot (or Janot), Colombian-born Luis, Finnish-born Jari, French-born Jean-Claude and Noël, Israeli-born Moïse, Algerian-born Brahim, Ivorian-born Koffi, and Venezuelan-born Mara.^[19][20] For some time, Baker lived with her children and an enormous staff in a castle, Château de Milandes, in Dordogne, France, with her fourth husband Jo Bouillon (a French conductor).

Josephine Baker was married four times. Her first marriage was to pullman Willie Wells in 1918 when she was just 13, and which was reportedly a very unhappy marriage. It was short lived and they divorced a short time later. She married Willie Baker in 1921 but that marriage also was short lived. She retained that last name simply because her career began taking off during that time and that is the last name with which she became best known. In 1937 she married Frenchman Jean Lion, during which time she received French citizenship and became a permanent expatriate. She and Lion separated before he passed away. In 1947 she married French Composer Jo Bouillon. They also divorced. She was later involved for a time with artist Joe Brady, but they never married. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Baker was bisexual. Her son Jean-Claude Baker and co-author Chris Chase state in Josephine: The Hungry Heart that she was involved in numerous lesbian affairs, both while she was single and married, and mention six of her female lovers by name. Clara Smith, Evelyn Sheppard, Bessie Allison, Ada "Bricktop" Smith, and Mildred Smallwood were all African-American women whom she met while touring on the black performing circuit early in her career. She was also reportedly involved intimately with French writer Colette. Not mentioned, but confirmed since, was her affair with Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.^[21] Jean-Claude Baker, who interviewed over 2,000 people while writing his book, wrote that affairs with women were not uncommon for his mother throughout her lifetime.^[22] He was quoted in one interview as saying:

"She was what today you would call bisexual, and I will tell you why. Forget that I am her son, I am also a historian. You have to put her back into the context of the time in which she lived. In those days, Chorus Girls were abused by the white or black producers and by the leading men if he liked girls. But they could not sleep together because there were not enough hotels to accommodate black people. So they would all stay together, and the girls would develop lady lover friendships, do you understand my English? But wait wait...If one of the girls by preference was gay, she'd be called a bull dyke by the whole cast. So you see, discrimination is everywhere."

Death[link]

On April 8, 1975, Baker starred in a retrospective revue at the Bobino in Paris, Joséphine à Bobino 1975, celebrating her 50 years in show business. The revue, financed by Prince Rainier, Princess Grace, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, opened to rave reviews. Demand for seating was such that fold-out chairs had to be added to accommodate spectators. The opening-night audience included Sophia Loren, Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassey, Diana Ross and Liza Minnelli.^[23]

Four days later, Baker was found lying peacefully in her bed surrounded by newspapers with glowing reviews of her performance. She was in a coma after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. She was taken to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where she died, aged 68, on April 12, 1975.^[23][24] Her funeral was held at L'Église de la Madeleine. The first American woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral, Baker locked up the streets of Paris one last time. She was interred at the Cimetière de Monaco in Monte Carlo.^[23]

Legacy[link]

Place Joséphine Baker in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris was named in her honor. She has also been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame and the Hall of Famous Missourians. Her name has also been incorporated at Paris Plage, a man-made beach along the river Seine "Piscine Joséphine Baker".

Two of Baker's sons, Jean-Claude and Jarry (Jari), grew up to go into business together, running the restaurant Chez Josephine on Theatre Row, 42nd Street, New York, which celebrates Baker's life and works.^[25]

Portrayals[link]

Baker pictured in her most famous costume for the Danse banane

• In 2006, Jérôme Savary produced a musical, "A La Recherche de Josephine - New Orleans for Ever" (Looking for Josephine). The story revolved around the history of jazz and Baker's career.
• In 1991, Baker's life story, The Josephine Baker Story, was broadcast on HBO. Lynn Whitfield portrayed Baker, and won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie—becoming the first Black actress to win the award in this category.
• In 2002, played by Karine Plantadit in Frida
• Josephine Baker appears in her role as a member of the French Resistance in Johannes Mario Simmel's 1960 novel, "Es Muss Nicht Immer Kaviar Sein" (On a pas toujours du caviar).
• The 2004 erotic novel Scandalous by British author Angela Campion uses Baker as its heroine and is inspired by Baker's sexual exploits and later adventures in the French Resistance. In the novel, Baker, working with a fictional black Canadian lover named Drummer Thompson, foils a plot by French fascists in 1936 Paris.
• Her influence upon and assistance with the careers of husband and wife dancers Carmen De Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder are discussed and illustrated in rare footage in the 2005 Linda Atkinson/Nick Doob documentary, Carmen and Geoffrey.^[26][27]
• Diana Ross famously portrayed Josephine Baker in both her Tony Award winning Broadway and television show "An Evening with Diana Ross". When the show was made into an NBC television special "The Big Event: An Evening with Diana Ross", she further embellished her role as Josephine. She worked for years to make a feature film of her life. Sadly, to no avail. Diana considers it a "lost dream". [(see "An Evening with Diana Ross" IMDB)]6 March 1977, Motown Productions.
• Beyoncé Knowles has portrayed Baker on various accounts throughout her career. During the 2006 Fashion Rocks show, Knowles performed "Dejá Vu" in a revised version of the Danse banane costume. In Knowles's video for "Naughty Girl", she is seen dancing in a huge champagne glass á La Baker. In I Am... Yours: An Intimate Performance at Wynn Las Vegas, Beyonce lists Baker as an influence of a section of her live show.
• In the 1997 animated film Anastasia, Baker appears with her cheetah during the musical number "Paris Holds the Key (to Your Heart)". A character clearly based upon Baker (topless, wearing the famous 'banana skirt') appears in the opening sequence of the 2003 animated film Les Triplettes de Belleville.
• A German submariner mimics Baker's Danse banane in the film Das Boot.
• In 2010, Keri Hilson portrayed Baker in her single "Pretty Girl Rock".
• Artist Hassan Musa portrayed Baker in a series of paintings called Who needs Bananas?^[28]
• In 2011, Sonia Rolland portrayed Baker in the film Midnight in Paris.

Film credits[link]

• La Sirène des tropiques (1927)
• Zouzou (1934)
• Princesse Tam Tam (1935)
• Fausse alerte (1940)
• Moulin Rouge (1941)
• An jedem Finger zehn (1954)
• Carosello del varietà (1955)

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• The Josephine Baker collection, 1926–2001 at Stanford University Libraries
• Baker, J. C. & Chase, C. (1993). Josephine: The Hungry Heart. New York: Random House.
• Bonini, Emmanuel (2000). La veritable Josephine Baker. Paris: Pigmalean Gerard Watelet.
• Kraut, Anthea, Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham, Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 433–50.
• Jules-Rosette, Bennetta (2006). "Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image". Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Schroeder, Alan, Ragtime Tumpie (Little, Brown, 1989), an award-winning children's picture book about Baker's childhood in St. Louis and her dream of becoming a dancer.
• Schroeder, Alan, Josephine Baker (Chelsea House, 1990), a young-adult biography.
• Theile, Merlind. "Adopting the World: Josephine Baker's Rainbow Tribe" Spiegel Online International, October 2, 2009.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Josephine Baker

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Josephine Baker

• Josephine Baker Official website
• Les Milandes- Josephine Baker's castle in France
• Josephine Baker at Allmusic
• Josephine Baker at the Internet Broadway Database
• Josephine Baker at the Internet Movie Database (self)
• Josephine Baker at the Internet Movie Database (character)
• Josephine Baker at Find a Grave
• A la recherche de Joséphine official site
• A Josephine Baker photo gallery
• Josephine Baker Photographs from the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri–St. Louis
• "Discography at Sony BMG Masterworks". Archived from the original on 2007-09-27. http://web.archive.org/web/20070927195431/http://sonybmgmasterworks.com/artists/josephinebaker/. 
• Photographs of Josephine Baker
• The electric body: Nancy Cunard sees Josephine Baker (2003) -- review essay of dance style and contemporary critics
• Guide to Josephine Baker papers at Houghton Library, Harvard University

Leonard Bernstein by Jack Mitchell

An unverified autograph

Leonard Bernstein ( /ˈbɜrnstaɪn/ US dict: bûrn′·stīn;^[1] August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim. According to The New York Times, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."^[2]

His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, as well as Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town and his own Mass.

Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist,^[3] often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.

As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and commercial success of West Side Story.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

He was born Louis Bernstein in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of Ukranian Jewish parents Jennie (née Resnick) and Samuel Joseph Bernstein, a hair-dressing supplies wholesaler originating from Rovno (now Ukraine).^[4][5] Despite his surname he was not related to film composer Elmer Bernstein, but the two men were friends, and even shared a certain physical similarity.^[6] Within the world of professional music, they were distinguished from each other by the use of the nicknames Bernstein West (Elmer) and Bernstein East (Leonard).^[7]

His family spent their summers at their vacation home in Sharon, Massachusetts. His grandmother insisted that his first name be Louis, but his parents always called him Leonard, which they preferred. He officially changed his name to Leonard when he was fifteen, shortly after his grandmother's death.^[8] To his friends and many others he was simply known as "Lenny."

His father, Sam Bernstein, was a businessman and owner of a bookstore in downtown Lawrence; it is standing today on the corners of Amesbury and Essex Streets. Sam initially opposed young Leonard's interest in music. Despite this, the elder Bernstein took him to orchestra concerts in his teenage years and eventually supported his music education. At a very young age, Bernstein listened to a piano performance and was immediately captivated; he subsequently began learning the piano seriously when the family acquired his cousin Lillian Goldman's unwanted piano. As a child, Bernstein attended the Garrison Grammar School and Boston Latin School.^[9] As a child he was very close to his younger sister Shirley, and would often play entire operas or Beethoven symphonies with her at the piano. He had a variety of piano teachers in his youth including Helen Coates who later became his secretary.

After graduation from Boston Latin School in 1935, Bernstein attended Harvard University, where he studied music with, amongst others, Edward Burlingame Hill and Walter Piston, the author of many harmony and counterpoint textbooks. Although he majored in music with a final year thesis (1939) entitled "The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music" (reproduced in his book Findings), Bernstein's main intellectual influence at Harvard was probably the aesthetics Professor David Prall, whose multidisciplinary outlook on the arts Bernstein shared for the rest of his life. One of his friends at Harvard was philosopher Donald Davidson, with whom he played piano four hands. Bernstein wrote and conducted the musical score for the production Davidson mounted of Aristophanes' play The Birds in the original Greek. Bernstein reused some of this music in the ballet Fancy Free. During his time at Harvard he was briefly an accompanist for the Harvard Glee Club.^[10] Bernstein also mounted a student production of The Cradle Will Rock, directing its action from the piano as the composer Marc Blitzstein had done at the premiere. Blitzstein, who heard about the production, subsequently became a friend and influence (both musically and politically) on Bernstein.

Bernstein also met the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos at this time. Although he never taught Bernstein, Mitropoulos's charisma and power as a musician was a major influence on Bernstein's eventual decision to take up conducting. Mitropoulos was not stylistically that similar to Bernstein, but he probably influenced some of Bernstein's later habits such as his conducting from the keyboard, his initial practice of conducting without a baton and perhaps his interest in Mahler. The other important influence that Bernstein first met during his Harvard years was composer Aaron Copland, whom he met at a concert and then at a party afterwards on Copland's birthday in 1938. At the party Bernstein played Copland's Piano Variations, a thorny work Bernstein loved without knowing anything about its composer until that evening. Although he was not formally Copland's student as such, Bernstein would regularly seek advice from Copland in the following years about his own compositions and would often cite him as "his only real composition teacher".^[11]

After completing his studies at Harvard in 1939 (graduating with a B.A. cum laude), he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. During his time at Curtis, Bernstein studied conducting with Fritz Reiner (who anecdotally is said to have given Bernstein the only "A grade" he ever awarded), piano with Isabelle Vengerova,^[12] orchestration with Randall Thompson, counterpoint with Richard Stöhr, and score reading with Renée Longy Miquelle.^[13] Unlike his years at Harvard, Bernstein appears not to have greatly enjoyed the formal training environment of Curtis, although often in his later life he would mention Reiner when discussing important mentors.^[11]

1940–1950[link]

Bernstein conducting the New York City Symphony (1945)

After he left Curtis, Bernstein lived in New York. He shared a flat with his friend Adolph Green and often accompanied Green, Betty Comden and Judy Holliday in a comedy troupe called The Reviewers who performed in Greenwich Village. He took jobs with a music publisher, transcribing music or producing arrangements under the pseudonym Lenny Amber (the German meaning of his name in English). During this period in New York City, Bernstein enjoyed an exuberant social life that included relationships with both men and women. In 1940, Bernstein began his study at the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer institute, Tanglewood, in the conducting class of the orchestra's conductor, Serge Koussevitzky.

Bernstein's friendships with Copland (who was very close to Koussevitsky) and Mitropoulos were important in him being recommended for a place in the class. Other students in the class included Lukas Foss who also became a lifelong friend. Koussevitsky perhaps did not teach Bernstein much basic conducting technique (which he had already developed under Reiner), but instead became a sort of father figure to him, and was perhaps the major influence on Bernstein's emotional way of interpreting music. Bernstein later became Koussevitzky's conducting assistant^[14] and would later dedicate his second symphony, "The Age of Anxiety", to him.^[15]

On November 14, 1943, having recently been appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, he made his major conducting debut at sudden notice—and without any rehearsal—after Bruno Walter came down with the flu. The next day, The New York Times carried the story on their front page and their editorial remarked, "It's a good American success story. The warm, friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread far over the air waves."^[16] He became instantly famous because the concert was nationally broadcast, and afterwards started to appear as a guest conductor with many US orchestras. The program included works by Schumann, Miklos Rozsa, Wagner and Richard Strauss's Don Quixote with soloist Joseph Schuster, solo cellist of the orchestra. Before the concert Bernstein briefly spoke to Bruno Walter, who discussed particular difficulties in the works he was to perform. It is possible to hear this concert (apart from the Wagner work) on a recording of the CBS radio broadcast that has been issued on CD by the orchestra.

Bernstein in 1944

From 1945 to 1947 Bernstein was the Music Director of the New York City Symphony Orchestra, which had been founded the previous year by the conductor Leopold Stokowski. The orchestra (with support from the Mayor) was aimed at a different audience with more modern programs and cheaper tickets than the New York Philharmonic.

In addition to becoming known as a conductor, Bernstein also emerged as a composer in the same period. In January 1944 he conducted the premiere of his Jeremiah Symphony in Pittsburgh. His score to the ballet Fancy Free choreographed by Jerome Robbins opened in New York in April 1944 and this was later developed into the musical On the Town with lyrics by Comden and Green that opened on Broadway in December 1944.

After World War II, Bernstein's career on the international stage began to flourish. In 1946 he made his first trip to Europe conducting various orchestras and recorded Ravel's Piano Concerto in G as soloist and conductor with the Philharmonia Orchestra. In 1946, he conducted opera for the first time, with the American première at Tanglewood of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, which had been a Koussevitzky commission. That same year, Arturo Toscanini invited Bernstein to guest conduct two concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, one of which again featured Bernstein as soloist in the Ravel concerto.^[17]

In 1947, Bernstein conducted in Tel Aviv for the first time, beginning a lifelong association with Israel. The next year he conducted an open air concert for troops at Beersheba in the middle of the desert during the Arab-Israeli war. In 1957, he conducted the inaugural concert of the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv; he subsequently made many recordings there. In 1967, he conducted a concert on Mt. Scopus to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem. During the 1970s, Bernstein recorded his symphonies and other works with the Israel Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon.

In 1949, he conducted the world première of the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Part of the rehearsal for the concert was released on CD by the orchestra. When Koussevitzky died two years later, Bernstein became head of the orchestral and conducting departments at Tanglewood, holding this position for many years.

1951–1959[link]

After much personal struggle and a turbulent on-off engagement, he married the Chilean actress Felicia Cohn Montealegre on September 10, 1951. One suggestion is that he chose to marry partly to dispel rumors about his private life to help secure a major conducting appointment, following advice from his mentor Dimitri Mitropoulos about the conservative nature of orchestra boards.^[18] Bernstein's sexuality has been a matter of speculation and debate. Arthur Laurents (Bernstein's collaborator in West Side Story) said that Bernstein was "a gay man who got married. He wasn't conflicted about it at all. He was just gay."^[19] Shirley Rhoades Perle, another friend of Bernstein's, said that she thought "he required men sexually and women emotionally."^[20] But the early years of his marriage seem to have been happy, and no one has suggested they didn't love one another. They had three children, Jamie, Alexander, and later Nina.^[21] There are reports though that Bernstein did sometimes have brief extramarital liaisons with young men, which several family friends have said his wife knew about.^[20]

In 1951, Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the world première of the Symphony No. 2 of Charles Ives, which was written around half a century earlier but had never been previously performed. Throughout his career Bernstein often talked about the music of Ives, who died in 1954. The composer, old and frail, was unable (or some reports say "unwilling") to attend the concert, but his wife did. He reportedly listened to a radio broadcast of it on a radio in his kitchen some days later. A recording of the "premiere" was released in a 10 CD box set Bernstein LIVE by the orchestra, but the notes indicate it was a repeat performance from three days later, and this is perhaps what Ives heard. In any case, reports also differ on Ives's exact reaction, but some suggest he was thrilled and danced a little jig. Bernstein recorded the 2nd symphony with the orchestra in 1958 for Columbia and 1987 for Deutsche Grammophon. There is also a 1987 performance with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra available on DVD.

Bernstein was a visiting music professor from 1951 to 1956 at Brandeis University, and he founded the Creative Arts Festival there in 1952.^[22] He conducted various productions at the first festival including the premiere of his opera Trouble in Tahiti and Blitzstein's English version of Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera. The festival was named after him in 2005, becoming the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts. In 1953 he was the first US conductor to appear at La Scala in Milan, conducting Maria Callas in Cherubini's Medea. The same year he produced his score to the musical Wonderful Town at very short notice, working again with his old friends Comden and Green, who wrote the lyrics.

In 1954 Bernstein made the first of his television lectures for the CBS arts program Omnibus. The live lecture, entitled "Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony", involved Bernstein explaining the work with the aid of musicians from the former NBC Symphony Orchestra (recently renamed the "Symphony of the Air") and a giant page of the score covering the floor. Bernstein subsequently performed concerts with the orchestra and recorded his Serenade for Violin with Isaac Stern. Further Omnibus lectures followed from 1955 to 1958 (later on ABC and then NBC) covering jazz, conducting, American musical comedy, modern music, J.S. Bach, and grand opera. These programs were made available in the USA in a DVD set in 2010.

In late 1956, Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in concerts that were to have been conducted by Guido Cantelli, who had tragically died in an air crash in Paris. This was the first time Bernstein had conducted the orchestra in subscription concerts since 1951. Partly due to these appearances, Bernstein was named the music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1957, replacing Dimitri Mitropoulos. He began his tenure in that position in 1958, having held the post jointly with Mitropoulos from 1957 to 1958. In 1958, Bernstein and Mitropoulos took the New York Philharmonic on tour to South America. In his first season in sole charge, Bernstein included a season-long survey of American classical music. Themed programming of this sort was fairly novel at that time compared to the present day. Bernstein held the music directorship until 1969 (with a sabbatical in 1965) although he continued to conduct and make recordings with the orchestra for the rest of his life and was appointed "laureate conductor".

He became a well-known figure in the United States through his series of fifty-three televised Young People's Concerts for CBS, which grew out of his Omnibus programs. His first Young People's Concert was televised a few weeks after his tenure began as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He became as famous for his educational work in those concerts as for his conducting. The Bernstein Young People's Concerts were the first and probably the most influential series of music appreciation programs ever produced on television, and they were highly acclaimed by critics.^[23] Some of Bernstein's music lectures were released on records, with at least one winning a Grammy award. The programs were shown in many countries around the world, often with Bernstein dubbed into other languages. Twenty-five of them were released on DVD by Kultur Video.

Bernstein at the piano, making annotations to a musical score

Prior to taking over the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein produced the music for two shows. The first was for the operetta Candide, which was first performed in 1956 with a libretto by Lillian Hellman based on Voltaire's novel. The second was Bernstein's collaboration with the choreographer Jerome Robbins, the writer Arthur Laurents, and the lyricist Stephen Sondheim to produce the musical West Side Story. The first three had worked on it intermittently since Robbins first suggested the idea in 1949. Finally, with the addition of Sondheim to the team and a period of concentrated effort, it received its Broadway premiere in 1957 and has since proven to be Bernstein's most popular and enduring score.

In 1959, he took the New York Philharmonic on a tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, portions of which were filmed by CBS. A highlight of the tour was Bernstein's performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, in the presence of the composer, who came on stage at the end to congratulate Bernstein and the musicians. In October, when Bernstein and the orchestra returned to the US, they recorded the symphony for Columbia. He recorded it for a second time with the orchestra on tour in Japan in 1979. Bernstein seems to have limited himself to only conducting certain Shostakovich symphonies, namely the numbers 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 14. He made two recordings of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, one with the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s and another one recorded live in 1988 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the only recording he ever made with them (including Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1).

1960–1969[link]

In 1960 Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic held a Mahler Festival to mark the centenary of the composer's birth. Bernstein, Walter and Mitropoulos conducted performances. The composer's widow, Alma, attended some of Bernstein's rehearsals. In 1960 Bernstein also made his first commercial recording of a Mahler symphony (the fourth) and over the next seven years he made the first complete cycle of recordings of all nine of Mahler's completed symphonies. (All featured the New York Philharmonic except the 8th Symphony which was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra following a concert in the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1966.) The success of these recordings, along with Bernstein's concert performances and television talks, was an important part of the revival of interest in Mahler in the 1960s, especially in the US.

Other non-US composers that Bernstein championed to some extent at the time include the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (who was perhaps then only a little known in the US) and Jean Sibelius, whose popularity had perhaps by then started to fade. Bernstein eventually recorded a complete cycle in New York of Sibelius's symphonies and three of Nielsen's symphonies (Nos. 2, 4, and 5), as well as conducting recordings of his violin, clarinet and flute concertos. He also recorded Nielsen's 3rd Symphony with the Royal Danish Orchestra after a critically acclaimed public performance in Denmark. Bernstein championed US composers, especially those that he was close to like Aaron Copland, William Schuman and David Diamond. He also started to more extensively record his own compositions for Columbia Records. This included his three symphonies, his ballets and the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story with the New York Philharmonic. He also conducted an LP of his 1944 musical On The Town, the first (almost) complete recording of the original featuring several members of the original Broadway cast, including Betty Comden and Adolph Green. (The 1949 film version only contains four of Bernstein's original numbers.)

In one oft-reported incident, in April 1962 Bernstein appeared on stage before a performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor with the pianist Glenn Gould. During rehearsals, Gould had argued for tempi much broader than normal, which did not reflect Bernstein's concept of the music. Bernstein gave a brief address to the audience starting with "Don't be frightened; Mr Gould is here..." and going on to "In a concerto, who is the boss (audience laughter)—the soloist or the conductor?" (Audience laughter grows louder). The answer is, of course, sometimes the one and sometimes the other, depending on the people involved."^[24] This speech was subsequently interpreted by Harold C. Schonberg, music critic for The New York Times, as abdication of personal responsibility and an attack on Gould, whose performance Schonberg went on to criticize heavily. Bernstein always denied that this had been his intent and has stated that he made these remarks with Gould's blessing.^[25] Throughout his life, he professed admiration and friendship for Gould. Schonberg was often (though not always) harshly critical of Bernstein as a conductor during his tenure as Music Director. However his views were not shared by the audiences (with many full houses) and probably not by the musicians themselves (who had greater financial security arising from Bernstein's many TV and recording activities amongst other things).

In 1962 the New York Philharmonic moved from Carnegie Hall to Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) in the new Lincoln Center. The move was not without controversy because of acoustic problems with the new hall. Bernstein conducted the gala opening concert featuring vocal works by Mahler, Beethoven and Vaughan Williams, and the premiere of Aaron Copland's Connotations, a serial-work that was merely politely received. During the interval Bernstein kissed the cheek of the President's wife Jacqueline Kennedy, a break with protocol that was commented on at the time. In 1961 Bernstein had conducted at President John F. Kennedy's pre-inaugural gala, and he was an occasional guest in the Kennedy White House. He also conducted at the funeral mass in 1968 for the late President Kennedy's brother Robert Kennedy.

In 1964 Bernstein conducted Franco Zeffirelli's production of Verdi's Falstaff at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1966 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera conducting Luchino Visconti's production of the same opera with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Falstaff. During his time in Vienna he also recorded the opera for Columbia Records and conducted his first subscription concert with the Vienna Philharmonic (which is made up of players from the Vienna State Opera) featuring Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde with Fischer-Dieskau and James King. He returned to the State Opera in 1968 for a production of Der Rosenkavalier and in 1970 for Otto Schenk's production of Beethoven's Fidelio. Sixteen years later, at the State Opera, Bernstein conducted his sequel to Trouble in Tahiti, A Quiet Place. with the ORF orchestra. Bernstein's final farewell to the State Opera happened accidentally in 1989: following a performance of Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, he unexpectedly entered the stage and embraced conductor Claudio Abbado in front of a cheering audience.

With his commitment to the New York Philharmonic and his many other activities, Bernstein had little time for composition during the 1960s. The two major works he produced at this time were his Kaddish Symphony dedicated to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy and the Chichester Psalms which he produced during a sabbatical year he took from the Philharmonic in 1965 to concentrate on composition. To try to have more time for composition was probably a major factor in his decision to step down as Music Director of the Philharmonic in 1969, and to never accept such a position anywhere again.

1970–1979[link]

Leonard Bernstein by Allan Warren

After stepping down from the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein continued to appear with them in most years until his death, and he toured with them to Europe in 1976 and to Asia in 1979. He also strengthened his relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra – he conducted all nine completed Mahler symphonies with them (plus the adagio from the 10th) in the period from 1967 to 1976. All of these were filmed for Unitel with the exception of the 1967 Mahler 2nd, which instead Bernstein filmed with the London Symphony Orchestra in Ely Cathedral in 1973. In the late 1970s Bernstein conducted a complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic, and cycles of Brahms and Schumann were to follow in the 1980s. Other orchestras he conducted on numerous occasions in the 1970s include the Israel Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

In 1970 Bernstein wrote and narrated a ninety-minute program filmed on location in and around Vienna as a celebration of Beethoven's 200th birthday. It featured parts of Bernstein's rehearsals and performance for the Otto Schenk production of Fidelio, Bernstein playing the 1st piano concerto and the Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic and the young Placido Domingo amongst the soloists. The program was first telecast in 1970 on Austrian and British television, and then on CBS in the US on Christmas Eve 1971. The show, originally entitled Beethoven's Birthday: A Celebration in Vienna, won an Emmy and was issued on DVD in 2005.

Like many of his friends and colleagues, Bernstein had been involved in various left wing causes and organizations since the 1940s. He was blacklisted by the US State Department and CBS in the early 1950s, but unlike others his career was not greatly affected, and he was never required to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.^[26] His political life received substantial press coverage though in 1970 due to a gathering hosted at his Manhattan apartment. Bernstein and his wife held the event seeking to raise awareness and money for the defense of several members of the Black Panther Party against a variety of charges.^[27] The New York Times initially covered the gathering as a lifestyle item, but later posted an editorial harshly unfavorable to Bernstein following generally negative reaction to the widely publicized story.^[28][29] This reaction culminated in June 1970 with the appearance of "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", an essay by satirist Tom Wolfe featured on the cover of the New York Magazine.^[30] The article contrasted the Bernsteins' comfortable lifestyle in one of the world's most expensive neighborhoods with the anti-establishment politics of the Black Panthers. It led to the popularization of "radical chic" as a critical term.^[31] Both Bernstein and his wife Felicia responded to the criticism, arguing that they were motivated not by a shallow desire to express fashionable sympathy but by their concern for civil liberties.^[32][33]

Bernstein's major compositions during the 1970s were probably his MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers; his score for the ballet Dybbuk; his orchestral vocal work Songfest; and his US bicentenary musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue written with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner which was his first real theatrical flop, and last original Broadway show. The world premiere of Bernstein's MASS took place on September 8, 1971. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., it was partly intended as an anti-war statement. Hastily written in places, the work represented a fusion not only of different religious traditions (Latin liturgy, Hebrew prayer and plenty of contemporary English lyrics) but also of different musical styles including classical and rock music. It was originally a target of criticism from the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand, and contemporary music critics who objected to its Broadway/populist elements on the other. In the present day it is perhaps seen as less blasphemous and more a piece of its era – in 2000 it was even performed in the Vatican.

In 1972 Bernstein recorded Bizet's Carmen, with Marilyn Horne in the title role and James McCracken as Don Jose, after leading several stage performances of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera. The recording was one of the first in stereo to use the original spoken dialogue between the sung portions of the opera, rather than the musical recitatives that were composed by Ernest Guiraud after Bizet's death. The recording was Bernstein's first for Deutsche Grammophon and won a Grammy.

Bernstein was appointed in 1973 to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair as Professor of Poetry at his alma mater, Harvard University, and delivered a series of six televised lectures on music with musical examples played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Taking the title from a Charles Ives work, he called the series "The Unanswered Question"; it was a set of interdisciplinary lectures in which he borrowed terminology from contemporary linguistics to analyze and compare musical construction to language. The lectures are presently available in both book and DVD form. The DVD video was not taken directly from the lectures at Harvard, rather they were recreated again at the WGBH studios for filming. This appears to be the only surviving Norton lectures available to the general public in video format. Noam Chomsky wrote in 2007 on the Znet forums about the linguistic aspects of the lecture: "I spent some time with Bernstein during the preparation and performance of the lectures. My feeling was that he was onto something, but I couldn't really judge how significant it was."

A major period of upheaval in Bernstein's personal life began in 1976 when he took the decision that he could no longer repress his homosexuality and he left his wife Felicia for a period to live with the writer Tom Cothran. The next year she was diagnosed with lung cancer and eventually Bernstein moved back in with her and cared for her until she died on June 16, 1978.^[18] Cothran himself died of AIDS in 1981. Bernstein is reported to have often spoken of his terrible guilt over his wife's death.^[18] Most biographies of Bernstein describe that his lifestyle became more excessive and his personal behavior sometimes cruder after her death. However his public standing and many of his close friendships appear to have remained unaffected, and he resumed his busy schedule of musical activity.

In 1978, Bernstein returned to the Vienna State Opera to conduct a revival of the Otto Schenk production of Fidelio, now featuring Gundula Janowitz and Rene Kollo in the lead roles. At the same time, Bernstein made a studio recording of the opera for Deutsche Grammophon and the opera itself was filmed by Unitel and released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon in late 2006. In May 1978, the Israel Philharmonic played two US concerts under his direction to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Orchestra under that name. On consecutive nights, the Orchestra, with the Choral Arts Society of Washington, performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and at Carnegie Hall in New York.

In 1979, Bernstein conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for the first and only time, in two charity concerts for Amnesty International involving performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The invitation for the concerts had come from the orchestra and not from its principal conductor Herbert von Karajan. There has been speculation about why Karajan never invited Bernstein to conduct his orchestra. (Karajan did conduct the New York Philharmonic during Bernstein's tenure.) The full reasons will probably never be known – reports suggest they were on friendly terms when they met, but sometimes practiced a little mutual one-upmanship.^[18] One of the concerts was broadcast on radio and was posthumously released on CD by Deutsche Grammophon.

1980–1990[link]

Bernstein received the Kennedy Center Honors award in 1980. For the rest of the 1980s he continued to conduct, teach, compose and produce the occasional TV documentary. His most significant compositions of the decade were probably his opera A Quiet Place which he wrote with Stephen Wadsworth and which premiered (in its original version) in Houston in 1983; his Divertimento for Orchestra; his Halil for flute and orchestra, his Concerto for Orchestra "Jubilee Games"; and his song cycle Arias and Barcarolles, which was named after a comment President Dwight D. Eisenhower had made to him in 1960.

In 1982 in the US, PBS aired an 11-part series of Bernstein's late 1970s films for Unitel of the Vienna Philharmonic playing all nine Beethoven symphonies and various other works. Bernstein gave spoken introduction and actor Maximilian Schell was also featured on the programs, reading from Beethoven's letters. The original films have since been released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon. In addition to conducting in New York, Vienna and Israel, Bernstein was a regular guest conductor of other orchestras in the 1980s. These included the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam with whom he recorded Mahler's First, Fourth, and Ninth Symphonies amongst other works; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich with whom he recorded Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Haydn's Creation, Mozart's Requiem and Mass in C Minor; and the orchestra of Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome with whom he recorded some Debussy and Puccini's La Boheme.

In 1982, he and Ernest Fleischmann founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute as a summer training academy along the lines of Tanglewood. Bernstein served as Artistic Director and taught conducting there until 1984. Around the same time he performed and recorded some of his own works with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon. Bernstein was also at the time a committed supporter of Nuclear Disarmament. In 1985 he took the European Community Youth Orchestra in a "Journey for Peace" tour around Europe and to Japan.

In 1985, he conducted a recording of West Side Story, the first time he had conducted the entire work. The recording, featuring what some critics felt were miscast opera singers such as Kiri Te Kanawa, José Carreras, and Tatiana Troyanos in the leading roles, was nevertheless an international bestseller. A TV documentary showing the making of the recording was made at the same time and is available on DVD.

In his later years, Bernstein's life and work was celebrated around the world (as it has been since his death). The Israel Philharmonic celebrated his involvement with them at Festivals in Israel and Austria in 1977. In 1986 the London Symphony Orchestra mounted a Bernstein Festival in London with one concert that Bernstein himself conducted attended by the Queen. In 1988 Bernstein's 70th birthday was celebrated by a lavish televised gala at Tanglewood featuring many performers who had worked with him over the years.

In December 1989 Bernstein conducted live performances and recorded in the studio his operetta Candide with the London Symphony Orchestra. The recording starred Jerry Hadley, June Anderson, Adolph Green and Christa Ludwig in the leading roles. The use of opera singers in some roles perhaps fitted the style of operetta better than some critics had thought was the case for West Side Story, and the recording (released posthumously in 1991) was universally praised. One of the live concerts from the Barbican Centre in London is available on DVD. Candide had had a troubled history, with many re-writes and writers involved. Bernstein's concert and recording were based on a "final" version that had been first performed by Scottish Opera in 1988. The opening night (which Bernstein attended in Glasgow) was conducted by Bernstein's former student John Mauceri.

Bernstein's grave in Green-Wood Cemetery

On December 25, 1989, Bernstein conducted Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in East Berlin's Schauspielhaus (Playhouse) as part of a celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He had conducted the same work in West Berlin the previous day. The concert was broadcast live in more than twenty countries to an estimated audience of 100 million people. For the occasion, Bernstein reworded Friedrich Schiller's text of the Ode to Joy, substituting the word Freiheit (freedom) for Freude (joy).^[34] Bernstein, in his spoken introduction, said that they had "taken the liberty" of doing this because of a "most likely phony" story, apparently believed in some quarters, that Schiller wrote an "Ode to Freedom" that is now presumed lost. Bernstein added, "I'm sure that Beethoven would have given us his blessing."

In the summer of 1990, Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. Like his earlier activity in Los Angeles, this was a summer training school for musicians modeled on Tanglewood, and is still in existence. Bernstein was already at this time suffering from the lung disease that would lead to his death. In his opening address Bernstein said that he had decided to devote what time he had left to education. A video showing Bernstein speaking and rehearsing at the first Festival is available on DVD in Japan.

Bernstein made his final performance as a conductor at Tanglewood on August 19, 1990, with the Boston Symphony playing Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" from Peter Grimes, and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.^[35] He suffered a coughing fit in the middle of the Beethoven performance which almost caused the concert to break down. The concert was later issued on CD by Deutsche Grammophon.

He announced his retirement from conducting on October 9, 1990,^[36] and died of pneumonia and a pleural tumor five days later. He was 72 years old.^[2] A longtime heavy smoker, he had battled emphysema from his mid-50s. On the day of his funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan, construction workers removed their hats and waved, yelling "Goodbye, Lenny."^[37] Bernstein is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, next to his wife and with a copy of Mahler's Fifth lying across his heart.^[38]

Social activism[link]

While Bernstein is very well known for his music compositions and conducting he is also known for his outspoken political views and his strong desire to further social change. His first aspirations for social change were made apparent in his producing (as a student) a recently banned opera, The Cradle Will Rock, about disparagement between the working and upper class. As he went on in his career Bernstein would go on to fight for everything from the influences of "American Music" to the disarming of nuclear weapons.^[39]

Philanthropy[link]

Among the many awards Bernstein earned throughout his life one allowed him to make one of his philanthropic dreams a reality. He had for a long time wanted to develop an international school to help promote the integration of arts into education. When he won the Japan Arts Association award for lifetime achievement,^[40] he used the 100 thousand dollars that came with the award to build such a school in Nashville, that would strive to teach teachers how to better integrate music, dance, and theater into the school system which was "not working".^[41] Unfortunately, the school was not able to open until shortly after Bernstein's death.

Influence and characteristics as a conductor[link]

Leonard Bernstein in 1971

Bernstein was one of the major figures in orchestral conducting in the second half of the 20th century. He was held in high regard amongst many musicians, including the members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, evidenced by his honorary membership; the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he was President; and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he appeared regularly as guest conductor. He was probably the main conductor from the 1960s onwards who acquired a sort of superstar status similar to that of Herbert von Karajan, although unlike Karajan he conducted relatively little opera and part of Bernstein's fame was based on his role as a composer. As the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic, his rise to prominence was a factor in overcoming the perception of the time that the top conductors were necessarily trained in Europe.

Bernstein's conducting was characterized by extremes of emotion with the rhythmic pulse of the music conveyed visually through his balletic podium manner. Musicians often reported that his manner in rehearsal was the same as in concert. As he got older his performances tended to be overlaid to a greater extent with a personal expressiveness which often divided critical opinion. Extreme examples of this style can be found in his Deutsche Grammophon recordings of Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations (1982), the end of Mahler's 9th Symphony (1985), and the finale of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony (1986), where in each case the tempos are well below those typically chosen.

Bernstein performed a wide repertoire from the baroque era to the 20th century, although perhaps from the 1970s onwards he tended to focus more on music from the romantic era. He was considered especially accomplished with the works of Gustav Mahler and with American composers in general, including George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Roy Harris, William Schuman, and of course himself. Some of his recordings of works by these composers would likely appear on many music critics' lists of recommended recordings. A list of his other well-thought-of recordings would probably include individual works from Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Nielsen, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Shostakovich, among others.^[42] His recordings of Rhapsody in Blue (full-orchestra version) and An American in Paris for Columbia Records, released in 1959, are considered definitive by many, although Bernstein cut the Rhapsody slightly, and his more 'symphonic' approach with slower tempi is quite far from Gershwin's own conception of the piece, evident from his two recordings. (Oscar Levant, Earl Wild, and others come closer to Gershwin's own style.) Bernstein never conducted Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, or Porgy and Bess, although he did discuss the latter in his article Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?, originally published in The New York Times and later reprinted in his 1959 book The Joy of Music.

In addition to being an active conductor, Bernstein was a very influential teacher of conducting. During his many years of teaching at Tanglewood and elsewhere, he directly taught or mentored many conductors who are performing now, such as Marin Alsop, Herbert Blomstedt, Edo de Waart, Alexander Frey, Paavo Järvi, John Mauceri, Eiji Oue, Seiji Ozawa (who made his US TV debut as the guest conductor on one of the Young People's Concerts), Carl St.Clair, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Jaap van Zweden. He also undoubtedly influenced the career choices of many US musicians who grew up watching his television programmes in the 1950s and 60s.

Recordings[link]

Bernstein recorded extensively from the 1950s until just a few months before his death. Aside from a few early recordings in the mid-1940s for RCA Victor, Bernstein recorded primarily for Columbia Masterworks Records, especially when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic. His typical pattern of recording at that time was to record major works in the studio immediately after they were presented in the orchestra's subscription concerts, with any spare time used to record short orchestral showpieces and similar works. Many of these performances were digitally remastered and reissued by Sony as part of their 100 Volume, 125 CDs "Royal Edition" and their later "Bernstein Century" series. In 2010 many of these recordings were repackaged in a 60 CD "Bernstein Symphony Edition".

His later recordings (starting with Bizet's Carmen in 1972) were mostly made for Deutsche Grammophon, though he would occasionally return to the Columbia Masterworks label. Notable exceptions include recordings of Gustav Mahler's Song of the Earth and Mozart's 15th piano concerto and "Linz" symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for Decca Records (1966); Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy (1976) for EMI; and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1981) for Philips Records, a label that like Deutsche Grammophon was part of PolyGram at that time. Unlike his studio recordings for Columbia Masterworks, most of his later Deutsche Grammophon recordings were taken from live concerts (or edited together from several concerts with additional sessions to correct errors). Many replicate repertoire that he recorded in the 1950s and 60s.

In addition to his audio recordings, many of Bernstein's concerts from the 1970s onwards were recorded on motion picture film by the German film company Unitel. This included a complete cycle of the Mahler symphonies (with the Vienna Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra), as well as complete cycles of the Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann symphonies recorded at the same series of concerts as the audio recordings by Deutsche Grammophon. Many of these films appeared on Laserdisc and are now on DVD.

In total Bernstein was awarded 16 Grammys for his recordings in various categories including several for recordings released after his death. He was also awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1985.

Influence and characteristics as a composer[link]

Bernstein was an eclectic composer whose music fused elements of jazz, Jewish music, theatre music and the work of older composers like Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, George Gershwin, and Marc Blitzstein. Some of his works, especially his score for West Side Story, helped bridge the gap between classical and popular music. His music was rooted in tonality but in some works like his Kaddish Symphony and the opera A Quiet Place he mixed in 12-tone elements. Bernstein himself said his main motivation for composing was "to communicate" and that all his pieces, including his symphonies and concert works, "could in some sense be thought of as 'theatre' pieces."^[43] According to the League of American orchestras,^[44] he was the second most frequently performed American composer by US orchestras in 2008-9 behind Copland, and he was the 16th most frequently performed composer overall by US orchestras. (Some performances were probably due to the 90th anniversary of his birth in 2008.) His most popular pieces were the Overture to Candide, the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, the Serenade for Violin, Strings, Harp and Percussion and the Three Dance Episodes from On the Town. His shows West Side Story, On the Town, Wonderful Town and Candide are regularly performed, and his symphonies and concert works are programmed from time to time by orchestras around the world. Since his death many of his works have been commercially recorded by artists other than himself. The Serenade, which has been recorded more than 10 times, is probably his most recorded work not taken from an actual theatre piece.

Despite the fact that he was a popular success as a composer, Bernstein himself is reported to have been disillusioned that some of his more serious works were not rated more highly by critics, and that he himself had not been able to devote more time to composing because of his conducting and other activities.^[37] Professional criticism of Bernstein's music often involves discussing the degree to which he created something new as art versus simply skillfully borrowing and fusing together elements from others. In the late 1960s, Bernstein himself reflected that his eclecticism was in part due to his lack of lengthy periods devoted to composition, and that he was still seeking to enrich his own personal musical language in the manner of the great composers of the past, all of whom had borrowed elements from others.^[45] Perhaps the harshest criticism he received from some critics in his lifetime though was directed at works like his Kaddish Symphony, his MASS and the opera A Quiet Place, where they found the underlying message of the piece or the text as either mildly embarrassing, clichéd or offensive. Despite this, all these pieces have been performed, discussed and reconsidered since his death.

Although he taught conducting, Bernstein was not a teacher of composition as such, and he has no direct composing heirs. Perhaps the closest are composers like John Adams who from the 1970s onwards indirectly adopted elements of his eclectic, theatrical style.

Works[link]

Ballet[link]

• Fancy Free, 1944
• Facsimile – Choreographic Essay for Orchestra, 1946
• Dybbuk (ballet), 1974

Opera[link]

• Trouble in Tahiti, 1952
• Candide, 1956 (new libretto in 1973, operetta final revised version in 1989)
• A Quiet Place, 1983

Musicals[link]

• On The Town, 1944
• Wonderful Town, 1953
• West Side Story, 1957
• The Race to Urga (incomplete), 1969
• "By Bernstein" (a Revue), 1975
• 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 1976
• "A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green", 1977
• The Madwoman of Central Park West, (contributed to) 1979

Incidental music and other theatre[link]

• Peter Pan, 1950
• The Lark, 1955
• The Firstborn, 1958
• Mass (theatre piece for singers, players and dancers), 1971
• "Side by Side by Sondheim"* 1976

Film scores[link]

• On the Town, 1949 (only part of his music was used)
• On the Waterfront, 1954
• West Side Story, 1961

Orchestral[link]

• Symphony No. 1, Jeremiah, 1942
• Fancy Free and Three Dance Variations from "Fancy Free,", concert premiere 1946
• Three Dance Episodes from "On the Town," concert premiere 1947
• Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, (after W. H. Auden) for Piano and Orchestra, 1949 (revised in 1965)
• Serenade for Solo Violin, Strings, Harp and Percussion (after Plato's "Symposium"), 1954
• Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs for Solo Clarinet and Jazz Ensemble, 1949
• Symphonic Suite from "On the Waterfront", 1955
• Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story", 1961
• Symphony No. 3, Kaddish, for Orchestra, Mixed Chorus, Boys' Choir, Speaker and Soprano Solo, 1963 (revised in 1977)
• Dybbuk, Suites No. 1 and 2 for Orchestra, concert premieres 1975
• Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems for Six Singers and Orchestra, 1977
• Three Meditations from "Mass" for Violoncello and Orchestra, 1977
• Slava! A Political Overture for Orchestra, 1977
• Divertimento for Orchestra, 1980
• Halil, nocturne for Solo Flute, Piccolo, Alto Flute, Percussion, Harp and Strings, 1981
• Concerto for Orchestra, 1989 (Originally Jubilee Games from 1986, revised in 1989)

Choral[link]

• Hashkiveinu for Cantor (tenor), Mixed Chorus and Organ, 1945
• Missa Brevis for Mixed Chorus and Countertenor Solo, with Percussion, 1988
• Chichester Psalms for Boy Soprano (or Countertenor), Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra, 1965 (Reduced version for Organ, Harp and Percussion)

Chamber music[link]

• Piano Trio, 1937, Boosey & Hawkes
• Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, 1939
• Brass Music, 1959
• Dance Suite, 1988

Vocal music[link]

• I Hate Music: A cycle of Five Kids Songs for Soprano and Piano, 1943
• Big Stuff, sung by Billie Holiday
• La Bonne Cuisine: Four Recipes for Voice and Piano, 1948
• Silhouette (Galilee), 1951
• Two Love Songs, 1960
• So Pretty, 1968
• Piccola Serenata, 1988
• Arias and Barcarolles for Mezzo-Soprano, Baritone and Piano four-hands, 1988

Piano music[link]

• Music for Two Pianos, 1937
• Piano Sonata, 1938
• 7 Anniversaries, 1944
• 4 Anniversaries, 1948
• 5 Anniversaries, 1952
• Bridal Suite, 1960
• Moby Diptych, 1981 (republished as Anniversaries nos. 1 and 2 in Thirteen Anniversaries)
• Touches, 1981
• 13 Anniversaries, 1988

Other music[link]

• Other occasional works, written as gifts and other forms of memorial and tribute
• "The Skin of Our Teeth": An aborted work from which Bernstein took material to use in his "Chichester Psalms"
• "Simhu Na" (arrangement of traditional song)
• "Waltz for Mippy III" for Tuba and Piano
• "Elegy for Mippy II" for Trombone alone
• "Elegy for Mippy I" for Horn and Piano
• "Rondo for Lifey" for Trumpet and Piano
• "Fanfare for Bima" for Brass Quartet: composed in 1947 as a birthday tribute to Koussevitzky using the tune he whistled to call his cocker spaniel^[46]
• "Shivaree: A Fanfare" for Double Brass Ensemble and Percussion. 1970. Commissioned by and dedicated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in honor of its Centenary. Musical material later used in "Mass."

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Bibliography[link]

• Bernstein, Leonard (1993 – reprinting) [1982]. Findings. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-42437-X. 
• Bernstein, Leonard (1993 – reprinting) [1966]. The Infinite Variety of Music. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-42438-8. 
• Bernstein, Leonard (2004 – reprinting) [1959]. The Joy of Music. Pompton Plains, New Jersey: Amadeus Press. ISBN 1-57467-104-9. 
• Bernstein, Leonard (2006 – reprinting) [1962]. Young People's Concerts. Milwaukee; Cambridge: Amadeus Press. ISBN 1-57467-102-2. 
• Bernstein, Leonard. [1976] The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-92001-5.

Videography[link]

• The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. West Long Branch, New Jersey: Kultur Video. VHS ISBN 1-56127-570-0. DVD ISBN 0-7697-1570-2. (videotape of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard in 1973.)
• Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. West Long Branch, New Jersey: Kultur Video. DVD ISBN 0-7697-1503-6.
• Bernstein on Beethoven: A Celebration in Vienna/Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1. West Long Branch, Kultur Video. DVD
• Leonard Bernstein: Omnibus – The Historic TV Broadcasts ,2010, E1 Ent.
• Bernstein: Reflections (1978), Euroarts.
• Bernstein/Beethoven (1982), Deustche Grammophon, DVD
• Bernstein Conducts "West Side Story" (1985) (retitled The Making of West Side Story in re-releases) Deutsche Grammophon, DVD
• "The Rite of Spring" in Rehearsal

Awards[link]

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1951^[47]
• Sonning Award (Denmark), 1956
• Ditson Conductor's Award, 1958
• George Peabody Medal – Johns Hopkins University, 1980
• Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 1987
• Royal Philarmonic Society Gold Medal (UK), 1987
• Knight Grand Cross Order of Merit (Italy), 1989
• Grammy Award for Best Album for Children
• Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance
• Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance
• Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording
• Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance
• Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance
• Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition
• Grammy Award for Best Classical Album
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
• Tony Award for Best Musical
• Special Tony Award
• Japan Arts Association Lifetime Achievement Award
• Gramophone Hall of Fame entrant^[48]

Further reading[link]

• Burton, Humphrey (1994). Leonard Bernstein. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-42345-4. 
• Gottlieb, Jack (ed.) (1992). Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts (revised ed.). New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-42435-3. 
• Bernstein, Burton; Haws, Barbara, eds. (2008). Leonard Bernstein: American Original. Contains chapters by Alan Rich, Paul Boyer, Carol J. Oja, Tim Page, Burton Bernstein, Jonathan Rosenberg, Joseph Horowitz, Bill McGlaughlin, James M. Keller, and John Adams. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-153786-1. 
• Chapin, Schuyler (1992). Leonard Bernstein: Notes from a Friend. New York: Walker. ISBN 0-8027-1216-9. 
• Rozen, Brian D. (1997). The Contributions of Leonard Bernstein to Music Education: An Analysis of his 53 Young People's Concerts. Thesis (PhD). Rochester, New York: University of Rochester. OCLC 48156751. 
• Laird, Paul R. (2002). Leonard Bernstein: A Guide to Research. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-8153-3517-2.  (online at Google Books)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Leonard Bernstein

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Leonard Bernstein

• Official website
• Discography
• The Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress Music Division
• Leonard Bernstein discography at MusicBrainz
• Discography at SonyBMG Masterworks
• Bernstein's Boston, a Harvard University research project
• FBI file on Leonard Bernstein
• Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts
• Gay Great – Leonard Bernstein
• Radical Chic, a book by Tom Wolfe describing a gathering at Bernstein's apartment of New York's social elite and the Black Panther Party.
• Leonard Bernstein: A Total Embrace of Music, written by Peter Gutmann, music journalist.
• Arias and Barcarolles, The Leonard Bernstein Pages
• Leonard Bernstein at the Internet Movie Database
• Leonard Bernstein at the Internet Broadway Database
• Leonard Bernstein at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Leonard Bernstein's maximum card from Israel
• Obituary, New York Times, October 15, 1990
• Leonard Bernstein: American Original (HarperCollins, 2008) Chapters by Alan Rich, Paul Boyer, Carol J. Oja, Tim Page, Burton Bernstein, Jonathan Rosenberg, Joseph Horowitz, Bill McGlaughlin, James M. Keller, John Adams

William M. Tweed
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 5th district
In office March 4, 1853 – March 3, 1855
Preceded by	George Briggs
Succeeded by	Thomas R. Whitney
Personal details
Born	(1823-04-03)April 3, 1823 New York City
Died	April 12, 1878(1878-04-12) (aged 55) New York City
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Mary Jane C. Skaden
Profession	Politician

William Magear Tweed (April 3, 1823 – April 12, 1878) – often erroneously referred to as William Marcy Tweed (see below),^[1] and widely known as "Boss" Tweed – was an American politician most notable for being the "boss" of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th century New York City and State. At the height of his influence, Tweed was the third-largest landowner in New York City, a director of the Erie Railroad, the Tenth National Bank, and the New-York Printing Company, as well as proprietor of the Metropolitan Hotel.^[2]

Tweed was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1852, and the New York County Board of Supervisors in 1858, the year he became the "Grand Sachem" of Tammany Hall. He was also elected to the New York State Senate in 1867, but Tweed's greatest influence came from being an appointed member of a number of boards and commissions, his control over political patronage in New York City through Tammany, and his ability to ensure the loyalty of voters through jobs he could create and dispense on city-related projects.

Tweed was convicted for stealing an amount estimated by an aldermen's committee in 1877 at between $25 million and $45 million from New York City taxpayers through political corruption, although later estimates ranged as high as $200 million.^[3] Based on the inflation or devaluation rate of the dollar since 1870 of 2.7%, $25–$200 million is between $1 and $8 billion 2010 dollars. He died in the Ludlow Street Jail.

Early life[link]

Tweed was born April 3, 1823 at 1 Cherry Street,^[4] on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Son of a third-generation Scottish-Irish chair-maker, Tweed grew up on Cherry Street. At the age of 11, he left school to learn his father's trade, and then became an apprentice to a saddler.^[4] He also studied to be a bookkeeper and worked as a brushmaker for a company he had invested in, before eventually joining in the family business in 1852.^[4] On September 29, 1844,^[5] he married Mary Jane C. Skaden, and lived with her family on Madison Street for two years.

Ticket to a 1859 "soiree" to benefit Tweed's Americus Engine Co.

Tweed became a member of the Odd Fellows and the Masons, and joined a volunteer fire company, Engine No. 12.^[4] In 1848, at the invitation of state assemblyman John J. Reilly, he and some friends organized the Americus Fire Company No. 6, also known as the "Big Six", as a volunteer fire company, which took as its symbol a snarling red Bengal tiger, a symbol which remained associated with Tweed and Tammany Hall for many years.^[4] At the time, volunteer fire companies competed vigorously with each other; some were connected with street gangs and had strong ethnic ties to various immigrant communities. The competition could be so fierce that buildings would sometimes burn down while the fire companies fought each other.^[6] Tweed became known for his ax-wielding violence, and was soon elected the Big Six foreman. Pressure from Alfred Carlson, the chief engineer, got him thrown out of the crew, but fire companies were also recruiting grounds for political parties at the time, and Tweed's exploits came to the attention of the Democratic politicians who ran the Seventh Ward, who put him up for Alderman in 1850, when Tweed was 26. He lost that election to the Whig candidate, but ran again the next year and won, garnering his first political position.^[7]

Tweed was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1852, but his two-year term was undistinguished.^[8] In an attempt by Republican reformers in Albany, the state capital, to control the Democratic-dominated New York City government, the power of the New York County Board of Supervisors was beefed up. The board had 12 members, six appointed by the mayor and six elected, and in 1858 Tweed was appointed to the board, which became his first vehicle for large-scale graft; Tweed and other supervisors forced vendors to pay a 15% overcharge to their "ring" in order to do business with the city.^[8] By 1853, Tweed was running the seventh ward for Tammany.^[4]

Although he was not trained as a lawyer, Tweed's friend George Barnard certified him as an attorney, and Tweed opened a law office on Duane Street. He ran for sheriff in 1861 and was defeated, but became the chairman of the Democratic General Committee shortly after the election, and was then chosen to be the head of Tammany's general committee in January 1863. Several months later, in April, he became "Grand Sachem", and began to be referred to as "Boss", especially after he tightened his hold on power by creating a small executive committee to run the club.^[4] Tweed then took steps to increase his income: he used his law firm to extort money, which was then disguised as legal services; he had himself appointed deputy street commissioner – a position with considerable access to city contractors and funding; he bought the New-York Printing Company, which became the city's official printer, and the city's stationery supplier, the Manufacturing Stationers' Company, and had both companies begin to overcharge for their goods and services.^[4] He also started to form what became known as the "Tweed Ring", by having his friends appointed to office: George Barnard became recorder; Peter B. Sweeny the district attorney; and Richard Connolly the county clerk.^[8]

Thomas Nast depicts Tweed in Harper's Weekly

With his new position and wealth came a change in style: Tweed began to favor wearing a large diamond in his shirtfront – a habit that Thomas Nast used to great effect in his attacks on Tweed in Harper's Weekly beginning in 1869 – and he bought a brownstone to live in at 41 West 36th Street, then a very fashionable area. He invested his now considerable illegal income in real estate, so that by the late 1860s he ranked among the biggest landowners in New York City.^[4]

Tweed was elected to the New York State Senate in 1867, where he helped financiers Jay Gould and Big Jim Fisk take control of the Erie Railroad from Cornelius Vanderbilt by arranging for legislation that legitimized fake Erie stock certificates that Gould and Fisk had issued. In return, Tweed received a large block of stock and was made a director of the company.^[4]

Corruption[link]

After the election of 1869, Tweed took control of the New York City government. His protégé, John Hoffman, the former mayor of the city, won election as governor, and Tweed garnered the support of good government reformers like Peter Cooper and the Union League Club, by proposing a new city charter which returned power to City Hall at the expense of the Republican-inspired state commissions. The new charter passed, thanks in part to $600,000 in bribes Tweed paid to Republicans, and was signed into law by Hoffman in 1870. Mandated new elections allowed Tammany to take over the city's Common Council when they won all fifteen aldermanic contests.^[9]

The new charter put control of the city's finances in the hands of a Board of Supervisors, which consisted of Tweed, who was the commissioner of public works, and mayor A. Oakey Hall and comptroller Richard "Slippery Dick" Connolly, both Tammany men. Hall also appointed other Tweed associates to high offices – such as Peter B. Sweeny, who took over the Department of Public Parks^[9] – providing the Tweed Ring with even firmer control of the New York City government^[10] and enabling them to defraud the taxpayers of many more millions of dollars. In the words of Albert Bigelow Paine, "their methods were curiously simple and primitive. There were no skilful manipulations of figures, making detection difficult ... Connolly, as Controller, had charge of the books, and declined to show them. With his fellows, he also 'controlled' the courts and most of the bar."^[11] Contractors working for the city – "Ring favorites, most of them – were told to multiply the amount of each bill by five, or ten, or a hundred, after which, with Mayor Hall's 'O. K.' and Connolly's indorsement, it was paid ... through a go-between, who cashed the check, settled the original bill and divided the remainder ... between Tweed, Sweeny, Connolly and Hall".^[12]

For example, the construction cost of the New York County Courthouse, begun in 1861, grew to nearly $13 million – about $178 million in today's dollars, and nearly twice the cost of the Alaska Purchase in 1867.^[13] "A carpenter was paid $360,751 (roughly $4.9 million today) for one month's labor in a building with very little woodwork ... a plasterer got $133,187 ($1.82 million) for two days' work".^[13]

Nast depicts the Tweed Ring: "Who stole the people's money?" / "'Twas him."

Tweed and his friends also garnered huge profits from the development of the Upper East Side, especially Yorkville and Harlem. They would buy up undeveloped property, then use the resources of the city to improve the area – for instance by installing pipes to bring in water from the Croton Aqueduct – thus increasing the value of the land, after which they sold and took their profits. The focus on the east side also slowed down the development of the west side, the topography of which made it more expensive to improve. The ring also took their usual percentage of padded contracts, as well as raking off money from property taxes. Despite the corruption of Tweed and Tammany Hall, they did accomplish the development of upper Manhattan, though at the cost of tripling the city's bond debt to almost $90 million.^[14]

During the Tweed era, the proposal to build a suspension bridge between New York and Brooklyn, then an independent city, was floated by Brooklyn-boosters, who saw the ferry connections as a bottleneck to Brooklyn's further development. In order to ensure that the Brooklyn Bridge project would go forward, State Senator Henry Cruse Murphy approached Tweed to find out whether New York's aldermen would approve the proposal. Tweed's response was that $60,000 for the aldermen would close the deal, and contractor William C. Kingsley put up the cash, which was delivered in a carpetbag. Tweed and two others from Tammany also received over half the private stock of the Bridge Company, the charter of which specified that only private stockholders had voting rights, so that even though the cities of Brooklyn and Manhattan put up most of the money, they essentially had no control over the project.^[15]

Tweed bought a mansion on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, and stabled his horses, carriages and sleighs on 40th Street. By 1871, he was a member of the board of directors of not only the Erie Railroad and the Brooklyn Bridge Company, but also the Third Avenue Railway Company and the Harlem Gas Light Company. He was president of the Guardian Savings Banks and he and his confederates set up the Tenth National Bank to better control their fortunes.^[4]

Scandal[link]

Tweed's downfall came in the wake of the Orange riot of 1871, which came after Tammany Hall banned a parade of Irish Protestants celebrating an historical victory against Catholicism, because of a riot the year before in which eight people died when a crowd of Irish laborers attacked the paraders. Under strong pressure from the newspapers and the Protestant elite of the city, Tammany reversed course, and the march was allowed to proceed, with protection from city policemen and state militia. The result was an even larger riot in which over 60 people were killed and more than 150 injured.

Although Tammany's electoral power base was largely centered in the Irish immigrant population, it also needed the city's elite to acquiesce in its rule, and this was conditional on the machine's ability to control the actions of their people, but the July riot showed that this capability was not nearly as strong as had been supposed.^[16]

Nast shows Tweed's source of power: control of the ballot box. "As long as I count the Votes, what are you going to do about it?"

Tweed had for months been under attack from the New York Times and Thomas Nast, the cartoonist from Harper's Weekly – regarding Nast's cartoons, Tweed reportedly said, "Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures!"^[17] – but their campaign had only limited success in gaining traction. They were able to force an examination of the city's books, but the blue-ribbon commission of six businessmen appointed by Mayor A. Oakey Hall, a Tammany man, which included John Jacob Astor III, banker Moses Taylor and others who benefited from Tammany's actions, found that the books had been "faithfully kept", letting the air out of the effort to dethrone Tweed.^[18]

The response to the Orange riot changed everything, and only days afterwards the Times/Nast campaign began to garner popular support.^[18] More importantly, the Times started to receive inside information from County Sheriff James O'Brien, whose support for Tweed had fluctuated during Tammany's reign. O'Brien had tried to blackmail Tammany by threatening to expose the ring's embezzlement to the press, and when this failed he provided the evidence he had collected to the Times.^[19] Shortly afterward, county auditor Matthew J. O'Rourke supplied additional details to the Times,^[19] which was reportedly offered $5 million to not publish the evidence.^[20] The Times also obtained the accounts of the recently-deceased James Watson, who was the Tweed Ring's bookkeeper, and these were published daily, culminating in a special four-page supplement on July 29 headlined "Gigantic Frauds of the Ring Exposed".^[18] In August, Tweed began to transfer ownership in his real-estate empire and other investments to his family members.^[4]

The exposes provoked an international crisis of confidence in New York City's finances, and, in particular, in its ability to repay its debts. European investors were heavily positioned in the city's bonds and were already nervous about its management – only the reputations of the underwriters were preventing a run on the city's securities. New York's financial and business community knew that if the city's credit was to collapse, it could potentially bring down every bank in the city with it.^[18]

Thus, the city's elite met at Cooper Union in September to discuss political reform: but for the first time, the conversation included not only the usual reformers, but also Democratic bigwigs such as Samuel J. Tilden, who had been thrust aside during Tammany's elevation. Although some at the meeting advocated lynching Tweed, the general consensus was that the "wisest and best citizens" should take over the governance of the city and attempt to restore investor confidence. The result was the formation of the Executive Committee of Citizens and Taxpayers for Financial Reform of the City (also known as "the Committee of Seventy"), which attacked Tammany by cutting off the city's funding. Property owners refused to pay their municipal taxes, and a judge – Tweed's old friend George Barnard, no less – enjoined the city Comptroller from issuing bonds or spending money. Unpaid workers turned against Tweed, marching en masse to City Hall demanding to be paid. Tweed doled out some funds from his own purse – $50,000 – but it wasn't sufficient to alleviate the crisis, and Tammany began to lose its essential base.^[18]

Shortly thereafter, the Comptroller resigned, appointing Andrew Haswell Green, an associate of Tilden's, as his replacement. Green loosened the purse strings again, allowing city departments not under Tammany control to borrow money to operate. Green and Tilden had the city's records closely examined, and discovered money that went directly from city contractors into Tweed's pocket. The following day, they had Tweed arrested.^[18]

Imprisonment, escape, and death[link]

Tweed was released on $1 million bail, and Tammany set to work to recover its position through the ballot box. Tweed was re-elected to the state senate in November 1871, due to his personal popularity and largesse in his district, but in general Tammany did not do well, and the members of the Tweed Ring began to flee the jurisdiction, many going overseas. Tweed was re-arrested, forced to resign his city positions, and was replaced as Tammany's leader. Once again, he was released on bail – $8 million this time – but Tweed's supporters, such as Jay Gould, felt the repercussions of his fall from power.^[18]

Tweed's first trial, in January 1873, ended with a hung jury, but his retrial in November resulted in convictions on 204 of 220 counts, a fine of $12,750^[4] ($225,000.00 in 2010, adjusted for inflation) and a prison sentence of twelve years; a higher court, however, reduced Tweed's sentence to one year.^[21] After his release from prison, New York State filed a civil suit against Tweed, attempting to recover $6 million in embezzled funds.^[21] Unable to put up the $3 million bail, Tweed was locked up in the Ludlow Street Jail, although he was allowed home visits. On one of these, Tweed escaped and fled to Spain, where he worked as a common seaman on a Spanish ship.^[18] The U.S. government discovered his whereabouts and arranged for his arrest as soon as he reached the Spanish border; he was recognized from Nast's political cartoons. He was turned over to an American warship,^[18] which delivered him to authorities in New York City on November 23, 1876, and he was returned to prison.^[22]

Desperate and broken, Tweed now agreed to testify about the inner workings of his corrupt Ring to a special committee set up by the Board of Alderman,^[4] in return for his release, but after he did so, Tilden, now governor of New York, refused to abide by the agreement, and Tweed remained incarcerated. He died in the Ludlow Street Jail on April 12, 1878 from severe pneumonia, and was buried in the Brooklyn Green-Wood Cemetery.^[23] Mayor Smith Ely would not allow the flag at City Hall to be flown at half staff.^[4]

Contributions[link]

In studies of Tweed and the Tammany Hall organization, historians have emphasized the thievery and conspiratorial nature of Boss Tweed, but along with lining his own pocket, and those of his friends and allies, Tammany and Tweed made substantial contributions to the development of New York City.

Tweed recognized that the support of his constituency was necessary for him to remain in power, and as a consequence he used the machinery of the city's government to provide numerous social services, including building more orphanages, almshouses and public baths.^[4] Tweed also fought for the New York State Legislature to donate to private charities of all religious denominations, subsidize Catholic schools and hospitals, and keep the King James Bible available in schools. From 1869 to 1871, under Tweed's influence, the state of New York spent more on charities than for the entire time period from 1852 to 1868 combined^[24] Tweed also pushed through funding for a teachers college and prohibition of corporal punishment in schools, as well as salary increases for school teachers. Certain aspects of Tammany Hall's activities – such as aid to the sick and unemployed, and advocacy for tenants and workers – foreshadowed later developments in the U.S. labor movement and Social Security.

During Tweed's regime, Broadway was widened between 34th Street and 59th Street, land was secured for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Upper East Side and Upper West Side were developed and provided the necessary infrastructure – all to the benefit of the purses of the Tweed Ring, but also, ultimately, to the benefit of the people of the city.

Tweed himself wanted no particular recognition of his achievements, such as they were. When it was proposed, in March 1871, when he was at the height of his power, that a statue be erected in his honor, he declared: "Statues are not erected to living men ... I claim to be a live man, and hope (Divine Providence permitting) to survive in all my vigor, politically and physically, some years to come."^[4] One of Tweed's unwanted legacies is that he has become "the archetype of the bloated, rapacious, corrupt city boss.^[4]

An 1869 tobacco label featuring Tweed

Middle name[link]

Tweed never signed his name with anything other than a plain "M.", and his middle name is often mistakenly listed, even by otherwise reputable sources, as "Marcy", rather than "Magear", but Tweed's son's name was William Magear Tweed, Jr. The confusion is almost certainly because of a Thomas Nast cartoon with a picture of Tweed, supplemented with a quote from William L. Marcy, the former governor of New York.^[25]

In popular culture[link]

In 1945 Boss Tweed was portrayed by Noah Beery, Sr. in the Broadway production of Up In Central Park, a musical comedy with music by Sigmund Romberg.^[26] The role was played by Malcolm Lee Beggs for a revival in 1947.^[27] In the 1948 film version, Tweed is played by Vincent Price.

On the 1963–1964 CBS TV series The Great Adventure, which presented one hour dramatizations of the lives of historical figures, Edward Andrews portrayed Tweed in the episode "The Man Who Stole New York City", which aired on December 13, 1963.^[28]

The 1976 novel Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, features a cameo appearance by Tweed, being tortured by demons in Hell.

In John Varley's 1977 science-fiction novel The Ophiuchi Hotline, a crooked politician in a 27th-century human settlement on the Moon assumes the name "Boss Tweed" in emulation of the 19th-century politician, and names his lunar headquarters "Tammany Hall". Tweed was played by Philip Bosco in the 1986 TV movie Liberty,^[29] and by Jim Broadbent as a major supporting character in the 2002 film Gangs of New York.^[30] Tweed is portrayed as a defender of the rights of minorities and helper of those in need in Pete Hamill's 2003 novel Forever.

References[link]

Notes

Bibliography

• Ackerman, K. D. (2005). Boss Tweed: The rise and fall of the corrupt pol who conceived the soul of modern New York. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0-7867-1435-2.
• Burrows, Edwin G. & Wallace, Mike (1999). Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195116348. 
• The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. High Beam Encyclopedia. 22, November 2008, [1]
• Ellis, Edward R. (2004). The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History. Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0-7867-1436-0,
• "Boss Tweed", Gotham Gazette, New York, 4 July 2005.
• Paine, Albert B. (1974). Th. Nast, His Period and His Pictures. Princeton: Pyne Press. ISBN 0-87861-079-0 (The original edition, published in 1904, is now in the public domain.)
• Sante, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003.

Further reading

• Hershkowitz, Leo. Tweed's New York: Another Look, 1977.
• Lynch, Denis T. Boss Tweed The story of a grim generation. Blue Ribbon Books NY first print 1927 copyright Boni & Liveright Inc.
• Mandelbaum, Seymour J. Boss Tweed's New York, 1965. ISBN 0-471-56652-7

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: William M. Tweed

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Boss Tweed

• William M. Tweed at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• William M. Tweed at Find a Grave
• Green-Wood Cemetery page for WM Tweed
• Texts on Wikisource:
  • "Tweed, William Marcy". The American Cyclopædia. 1879. 
  • "Tweed, William Marcy". Collier's New Encyclopedia. 1921. 
  • Beach, Chandler B., ed. (1914). "Tweed, William Marcy". The New Student's Reference Work. Chicago: F. E. Compton and Co.. Wikisource