7 Leonard Bernstein 7

As a composer Bernstein made skillful use of diverse
elements ranging from biblical themes, as in the Symphony
No. 1 (1942; also called Jeremiah) and the Chichester Psalms
(1965); to jazz rhythms, as in the Symphony No. 2 (1949; The
Age of Anxiety), after a poem by W.H. Auden; to Jewish
liturgical themes, as in the Symphony No. 3 (1963; Kaddish).
His best-known works are the musicals On the Town (1944;
filmed 1949), Wonderful Town (1953; filmed 1958), Candide
(1956), and the very popular West Side Story (1957; filmed
1961), written in collaboration with Stephen Sondheim
and Jerome Robbins. He also wrote the scores for the
ballets Fancy Free (1944), Facsimile (1946), and Dybbuk
(1974), and he composed the music for the film On the
Waterfront (1954), for which he received an Academy Award
nomination. His Mass, written especially for the occasion,
was performed at the opening of the John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., in
September 1971. In 1989 he conducted two historic perfor-
mances of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D
Minor (1824; Choral), which were held in East and West
Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Bernstein published a collection of lectures, The Joy of
Music (1959); Young People’s Concerts, for Reading and Listening
(1962, rev. ed. 1970); The Infinite Variety of Music (1966); and
The Unanswered Question (1976), taken from his Charles
Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University (1973).

Pete Seeger

(b. May 3, 1919, New York, N.Y., U.S.)

A

merican singer Pete Seeger sustained the folk
music tradition and was one of the principal inspi-
rations for younger performers in the folk revival of
the 1960s.