Featured Work
WEST SIDE STORY (1957)
The gem of Broadway musicals, West Side Story's commentary on love and prejudice is relevant to any time and place. This groundbreaking collaboration among Bernstein, Jerome Robbins (conception and choreography), Arthur Laurents (book), and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) captured the fiber of American society through its best and worst characteristics. West Side Story first appeared on Broadway in 1957 and garnered outstanding reviews. The 1961 soundtrack to the feature film version continues to hold the record for number of weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's chart (54).
The Leonard Bernstein Office Mission
The Leonard Bernstein Office (LBO) sustains and strengthens Leonard Bernstein’s legacy by inspiring global engagement with his work as a composer, conductor, educator, and humanitarian. Through licensing, promotion, music editing, and publishing, the LBO strives to communicate his lifelong devotion to the transformative power and joy of music.
Submit your memories to the Leonard Bernstein Memory Project and help us keep his legacy alive.
Thus Spake Leonard Bernstein:
“Teaching is probably the noblest profession in the world -- the most unselfish, difficult, and honorable profession, but it is also the most unappreciated, underrated, underpaid, and under-praised profession in the world.”
Leonard Bernstein, “A Tribute to Teachers”, 1963