Bernstein berlin wall beethoven biography
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Between Rock and a Hard Place
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller on escapes beneath the Berlin Wall, “The Tunnels,” “Journeys With Beethoven,” and the recent award-winning “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He has directed three documentary films since 2021 for PBS (including “Atomic Cover-up”) . He was #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy during the 1970s. You can subscribe to this newsletter for free.
Leonard Bernstein, the renowned conductor, composer and liberal political activist—and subject of the new Bradley Cooper movie Maestro--came to Germany in December 1989 just after the Berlin Wall was cracked open and thousands of East Germans poured through to be united with their German brothers and sisters after 28 years of separation. Bernstein was 71, and in failing health. In 10 months he would die of cancer. "Lenny," as he was called by those who knew him, w
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Bernstein's Beethoven – Ode to Freedom
Posted May 6, 2024
ODE TO FREEDOM
Special exhibition at the Beethoven-Haus shows Leonard Bernstein as outstanding Beethoven Ambassador
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Image Source: Beethoven-Haus Bonn
BTHVN2024 – 200 years of the Ninth Symphony
Special Exhibition at the museum
Bernstein's Beethoven – Ode to Freedom
May 3 to August 19, 2024
At Christmas 1989, the American dirigent Leonard Bernstein wrote music history when he performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in East and West Berlin shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall with a slightly different text as an ‘Ode to Freedom’. The Beethoven-Haus Bonn commemorates these legendary concerts in a special exhibition that shows Bernstein's complex engagement with Beethoven and honours him as an outstanding Beethoven ambassador. The opening of the exhibition, which is sponsored by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, is also attended by Bernstein
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Critical Drift
When rock critic Jonathan Cott met with Leonard Bernstein in November, 1989, it was the last long interview the conductor and composer would give. It was a heady time for both Bernstein and the world, which Lenny would sum up in six words to Cott:
“The Berlin Wall is fucking down!”
Leonard Bernstein with assistant Craig Urquhart at the Berlin Wall, December 1989. Lenny had borrowed the hammer from the boy in the red jacket to get his own piece of the Wall. (Photo: Andreas Meyer-Schwickerath)
For Bernstein, it was one of the most exciting things that had happened in his 71 years, second perhaps only to the Kennedy inauguration. And, to his credit, Lenny had lived through a lot: Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1918, he was a little over two months old when Armistice Day ended World War I. He survived the HUAC era, during which he was labeled a “communist dupe” by Life magazine. He survived the turbulent process of writing and mounting Candide (whose helpin