Dinner with Lenny

Leonard Bernstein was arguably the most highly esteemed influential and charismatic American classical music personality of the twentieth century. Conductor composer pianist writer educator and human rights activist Bernstein truly led a life of Byronic intensity--passionate risk-taking and convention-breaking. <p/>In November 1989 just a year before his death Bernstein invited writer Jonathan Cott to his country home in Fairfield Connecticut for what turned out to be his last major interview--an unprecedented and astonishingly frank twelve-hour conversation. Now in <em>Dinner with Lenny</em> Cott provides a complete account of this remarkable dialogue in which Bernstein discourses with disarming frankness humor and intensity on matters musical pedagogical political psychological spiritual and the unabashedly personal. Bernstein comes alive again with vodka glass in hand singing humming and making pointed comments on a wide array of topics from popular music (the Beatles were the best songwriters since Gershwin) to great composers (Wagner was always in a psychotic frenzy. He was a madman a megalomaniac) and politics (lamenting the brainlessness the mindlessness the carelessness and the heedlessness of the Reagans of the world). And of course Bernstein talks of conducting advising students to look at the score and make it come alive as if they were the composer. If you can do that you're a conductorand if you can't you're not. If I don't <em>become</em> Brahms or Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky when I'm conducting their works then it won't be a great performance. <p/>After <em>Rolling Stone</em> magazine published an abridged version of the conversation in 1990 the <em>Chicago Tribune</em> praised it as an extraordinary interview filled with passion wit and acute analysis. Studs Terkel called the interview astonishing and revelatory. Now this full-length version provides the reader with a unique you-are-there perspective on what it was like to converse with this gregarious witty candid and inspiring American dynamo.<br>