Leonard Bernstein
August, 1958
"I never thought I'd use that horrid expression, 'musical genius,'" the late music critic Olin Downes once said: "You can blame Lenny for making me sound trite." Downes' Lenny, of course, was Leonard Bernstein, who last November became the first American-born (Lawrence, Mass.) conductor to be appointed Musical Director of the New York Philharmonic and, at exactly 40, is the second youngest ever to hold the position. For the past two decades, Wunderkind Bernstein has had his t...
