In an era when classical music garnered almost as much attention in the popular press as professional sports, it was indeed significant news when a 25-year-old unknown conducted the country’s leading symphony orchestra in a live Carnegie Hall concert broadcast to millions on the radio.
For The New York Times, this was a story fit for the front page: “Young Aide Leads Philharmonic, Steps In When Bruno Walter Is Ill,” declared the headline. November 15, 1943, marked the date, and the prominent music piece on Page 1 of The New York Times that day reported on the captivating public debut of young conductor Leonard Bernstein, who had stepped in as a last-minute substitute for the regular conductor and had brilliantly led the New York Philharmonic in the previous day’s performance.
Raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Bernstein was a musical prodigy who experienced a significant awakening at age 10 when an aunt undergoing divorce sent her upright piano to his family’s residence for temporary storage. As Bernstein recounted, upon seeing the piano, he touched the keys and exclaimed, “Ma, I want lessons!” From the start, it appeared that Leonard Bernstein exhibited an exuberance that would continue to define his work as a conductor many decades later. Commenting on Bernstein’s surprise debut in his review published on this day in 1943, music critic Olin Downes of the Times noted, “Mr. Bernstein advanced to the podium with the unfeigned eagerness and communicative emotion of his years.”
Bernstein’s initial performance accelerated his ascent into the upper echelons of American symphonic conductors, and he garnered fame, even among casual classical music listeners, thanks to enthusiastic press coverage and the live nationwide radio broadcast of the concert. Throughout the next 14 years, Bernstein’s reputation became even more pronounced, not only as a conductor celebrated for championing American composers like Charles Ives and Aaron Copland but also as a composer and a well-known television personality. By the time he assumed the role of principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1957, he had already created music for works such as On The Town, Candide , and West Side Story, among many other stage and orchestral productions, and had attained considerable popularity through his appearances on the CBS television variety show Omnibus, which eventually led to his immensely successful series of televised Young People’s Concerts in the late 1950s and 1960s.
