Dinner with Lenny Quotes

“So there I am standing in the wings. All atremble with these two little pills in my pocket … And I took them out and looked at them and said, ‘I’m going to do this on my own. I am not going to take any pills. I don’t want any aid from anybody but God,’ and I just flung them across the entire backstage and strode out, and that’s the last thing I remember until the end of the concert when I saw the entire audience there, standing and cheering and screaming. But from the time of my entrance until the time of my last exit I remember nothing. There’s nothing I can tell you. It was all a dream.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Sometime between four o’clock and dawn, Bernstein returned home with a hangover. At nine in the morning, he was awakened by a phone call from the Philharmonic’s associate manager who told him, “Well, this is it. You have to conduct at three o’clock. No chance of a rehearsal. You will report at a quarter of three backstage.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Aaron Copland, whom Bernstein had met when he was in his junior year at Harvard and who would become a lifelong friend and mentor, wrote him encouraging letters. “Don’t expect miracles,” Copland advised the young man, “and don’t get depressed if nothing happens for a while. That’s NY.” But on August 25, 1943, his twenty-fifth birthday, Bernstein got his first professional break when Artur Rodzinski, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, chose him to become his conducting assistant. “I have gone through all the conductors I know of in my mind,” Rodzinski explained to his new assistant, “and I finally asked God whom I should take, and God said, ‘Take Bernstein.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Bernstein observed that the composer was “born in the spring and died in the spring. In a sense, he lived his whole life in a springtime of creativity. All his music is springlike, newly budding, rooted in the familiar past, yet fresh and sharp, with that stinging, paradoxical combination of the inevitable and the unexpected.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Bernstein nevertheless received Nixon’s highest accolade when, on the Watergate Tapes, the president is heard calling the composer a “son of a bitch.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“(In 1945, the producer Hal Wallis of Paramount Pictures seriously discussed the idea of making a “biopic” in which Bernstein would have played Tchaikovsky and Greta Garbo would have played Baroness von Meck, the composer’s patroness.)”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“she also thought it would be helpful to send Bernstein a copy of a book of conversations I had done with the pianist Glenn Gould, who, it turned out, was one of Bernstein’s musical heroes, as well as a close and adored friend. It was a long wait, but at last, in September of 1989, Maggie telephoned to give me the good news that I had passed Harry Kraut’s audition, that Bernstein had read my book, and that he had not only agreed to give me an interview but had also suggested that we do so over dinner at his country home in Connecticut on November 20.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“he received a letter of admonition from his mother, Jennie: “Lenny dear,” she wrote, “please don’t tell reporters of your personal views…it’s very bad taste. It will not do you much good. It may have bad repercussions. From now on you should be very conservative in your statements to the public. Just a little advice from your mother and I’m sure it will not harm you.” Bernstein did not heed his mother’s advice; and it is unsettling to discover that during the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept an active file of almost seven hundred pages on Bernstein’s political opinions and activities from as early as the mid-1940s.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“WOW!” A GALVANIZED Igor Stravinsky reportedly exclaimed after listening to Leonard Bernstein’s astonishing recording of The Rite of Spring—a still-unsurpassed performance that Columbia Records captured more than fifty years ago in a single inspired and electrically charged recording session on January 20, 1958, in New York City.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Look at the score and make it come alive as if [you] were the composer. If you can do that, you're a conductor and if you can't, you're not. If I don't become Brahms or Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky when I'm conducting their works, then it won't be a great performance.”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

“Anything of a serious nature isn’t “instant”—you can’t “do” the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God’s sake?”
― Jonathan Cott, Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein