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Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic stand among his greatest achievements. These televised programs introduced an entire generation to the joys of classical music.

Bernstein conducted his first Young People's Concert on January 18, 1958, just two weeks after becoming Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. Such programs were already a Philharmonic tradition when Bernstein arrived, but he made them a centerpiece of his work, part of what he described as his "educational mission." Looking back on the concerts years later, he referred to them as being "among my favorite, most highly prized activities of my life." When he took a sabbatical season from the orchestra in 1964-65, he still came back to lead the Young People's Concerts. He continued to lead these programs until 1972, even though he had stepped down as director of the Philharmonic in 1969.

Bernstein led a total of fifty-three Young People's Concerts during those fourteen years, and covered a broad range of subjects. The works of the great composers were explored, including tributes to modern masters such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Paul Hindemith, Gustav Holst, Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. Bernstein discussed "Jazz in the Concert Hall," "Folk Music in the Concert Hall," and "The Latin-American Spirit." He explained the intricacies of Music Theory in programs such as "Musical Atoms: A Study of Intervals" and "What is a Mode?" He broached complex aesthetic issues such as "What Does Music Mean?" (his first program) with clarity and without condescension. Bernstein also used the Young People's Concerts to introduce young performers to the musical world. The sixteen year-old pianist André Watts made his debut in the concert of January 15, 1963.

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Loving opera is such a simple thing. And yet the conventional wisdom seems to strive to make it complicated. Opera, and classical music, are elitist and arcane: This view is held both by people who don’t care for them, and by many of those who do. How many fans have you heard using words like “passaggio,” “portamento,” “tessitura,” as if to signal their insider knowledge? Even an innocuous mention of “Beethoven’s Op. 111,” which seems like a perfectly reasonable way to refer to that composer’s final piano sonata, earned me a snort of suppressed laughter from a non-specialist friend the other week during a discussion of whether classical music can ever really rock.

So how do people actually become fans of such off-putting stuff? If you look through a bookstore, you can find an entire literature of classical-music introductions and “Opera 101s,” most of it at least tacitly based on the idea that you need to grasp this specialized knowledge to enjoy, or even to partake of, this refined fare. Well, you need specialized knowledge to watch a baseball game, too, but people don’t generally seek out books called “An Introduction to Baseball” to understand what they’re supposed to be getting out of a game.

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Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts

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One of my favorites. This one is like the telling of a sad, sad story: Moonlight Sonata

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