The Original Culture Warrior

It is one of those stories that never get old. Once upon a time, a matinee crowd bustled into Carnegie Hall to hear a program led by the visiting German-born conductor Bruno Walter. After taking their seats, the concertgoers learned that the maestro had fallen ill and would not appear. Even worse, it turned out that the only person available to lead the mighty New York Philharmonic on a half day's notice was a skinny assistant conductor who hadn't had time to rehearse the music (which boded ill), was born in America (unlikely in those days) and was just 25 years old (preposterous at any time). Under these fraught circumstances, the kid delivered a performance kinetic enough to be extraordinary. As in four-curtain-calls extraordinary. As in front-page-of-the-next-day's-New-York-Times extraordinary. As in (keep in mind the live radio feed beaming it from coast to coast) Bobby-Thomson-"the-Giants-win-the-pennant" extraordinary.

Leonard Bernstein captured the public imagination that day in 1943 and, in five succeeding decades as conductor, composer, teacher, activist and all-around personality, never let it go. This fall, what feels like half the cultural institutions in New York City have banded together to honor his far-flung achievements. Led by Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic, "Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds" marks the 90th anniversary of his birth and the 50th anniversary of his appointment as music director of the Philharmonic. There are symphonic concerts (some featuring student choirs drawn from public schools), jazz renditions of his work (by Bill Charlap), an in-depth film retrospective at Lincoln Center and even "Our Lenny," a two-week radio celebration that aired earlier this month and now streams on wnyc.org. This octopus-armed reach is only fitting for the man who was captured in a 1957 Time cover story staggering to bed at 3 a.m. and gazing in horror at the next day's schedule. "Who do I think I am," he cried, "everybody?"

Though it's a little awkward to be celebrating a 90th birthday instead of a proper centennial, the timing turns out to be propitious, too. Spend a little time chasing Bernstein's legacy around town, and you pick up overtones of a rare sensibility. Today, when high and low culture sneer at each other across a gulf of incomprehension and politically useful ill will, Bernstein seems a glorious freak: the avatar of a democratic cultural dream that elitism and populism can commune, not to cancel each other out but to their mutual benefit. This is not what Tocqueville had in mind when he predicted that the sprawling patchwork nature of our society doomed us to mediocre, middle-ground art. But not even the prophetic Tocqueville could see Lenny Bernstein coming.

"I love two things: music and people," says Bernstein in "The Gift of Music," one of the biographical films screening at Lincoln Center this fall. "I don't know which I like better." There were times when he had to choose, to fight to give himself time to compose. But for the most part, Bernstein's life is defined by the fruitful interplay between the two. Growing up in Lawrence, Mass., he couldn't persuade his father to pay for piano lessons, forcing the teenage Lenny to teach students even younger and greener than he was to earn the money to keep learning. After he graduated from Harvard, "conductor" became the perfect description of what he did, because the energy of a composition flowed through him like current down a wire: he swayed, he jabbed his baton, he strutted like Jagger.

In the 1950s, he later recalled, his "old quasi-rabbinical instinct for teaching and explaining and verbalizing suddenly found a paradise in television." With his youthful energy, good looks and lion's charisma, Bernstein exploited the new medium in ways that still captivate. Whether demystifying Bach for a broad public or defending jazz to those who thought the music "low class," he refused to dumb down. "Music is hard," he acknowledged. Honoring its complexity while reaching out to a wide audience—both to adult viewers and via his Young People's Concerts—required a careful balance, one he knew was impossible to achieve "without the conviction that the public is not a great beast but an intelligent organism, more often than not longing for insight and knowledge."

Though this outlook seemed novel, it was, in fact, deeply retro—and distinctly American. When the country's identity took shape in the 19th century, our culture was a rollicking, boundary-busting free-for-all. Lawrence W. Levine's history "Highbrow/Lowbrow" testifies to the central place that Shakespeare and opera occupied in the national consciousness, appealing equally—and simultaneously—to all classes and socioeconomic groups. "Richard III" might share a bill with magicians or minstrels, or be lampooned as "Bad Dicky"; soldiers marched off to the Civil War to the "Traviata Quickstep." There are plenty of elements of this cultural scene we should be glad to have outgrown. (In 1897, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was proud to note that "there is no more spitting tobacco juice on the gallery floors.") But we should—and Bernstein did—regret the loss of what Levine calls "a shared public culture," one less hierarchically organized and split into fewer little categories than the scene we know today.

It's no coincidence—though it was Bernstein's immense good fortune—that his zenith came at a moment when some powerful people shared this desire. The Kennedys made their White House, in the words of Richard Hofstadter, "a center of receptivity to culture." Bernstein performed at the Inaugural Gala, and, like Pablo Casals, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost and other high-art luminaries, found a warm welcome throughout the Camelot years. Swept up in the notion that Americans might be able to meet not at the lowest common denominator but at the cultural peak, Bernstein was devastated by JFK's death, which was also the death of Camelot. He dedicated his Third Symphony, "Kaddish," to the late president.