Bernstein returns

Bernstein at Tanglewood, 1948. From the Library of Congress.

Twenty-seven years after its premiere, Leonard Bernstein's opera A Quiet Place is finally arriving in Manhattan: New York City Opera presents the work beginning on Wednesday. Zachary Woolfe has a preview in today's New York Times; there's also a piece by William Braun in Opera News. With Lenny in the air, I thought I'd link again to "The Bernstein Files," a three-part multimedia piece I published on the New Yorker website last year. Here's a quick highlight reel from the Nixon tapes, in which Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, and, briefly, Ginger Rogers address Bernstein's Mass and other musical matters:

Nixon vs. Bernstein