Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918)

Did Leonard Bernstein introduce me to classical music when I was a child? I don't remember watching his famous TV shows. In fact, my development as a classical music lover actually came from my father, who listened always to the classical music station and the Saturday afternoon opera broadcasts.

Bernstein, I remember for West Side Story. I doubt if I even noticed that he was Jewish when I was listening to it during high school. And I couldn't say if his music had a particularly noticeable Jewish identity. He wrote Jeremiah (1943), Age of Anxiety (1949), Kaddish (1963), Dybbuk (1974) – as well as a mass.