Featured Work
Arias and Barcarolles (1988)
This eight-part song cycle for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and piano four hands or two chamber orchestra versions was composed in 1988. The varied songs, most with lyrics by Bernstein himself, reflect many compositional styles that make this cycle charming and entertaining.
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:
"In honoring Helen Coates, my teacher, I mean to honor all teachers, in all fields and disciplines; I mean to honor teaching itself, man’s noblest profession, as well as his most underrated and underpaid profession. The best teachers I have had – and I have been lucky enough to have had many good ones – have consistently taught me not only the stored-up illuminations of their minds, but inevitably something about teaching itself. And to whatever extent I am today a teacher, in whatever unorthodox ways, I owe this overwhelming urge to share my ideas with others to those very teachers, Helen Coates among them. I have learned from them to suggest the profound meanings of work to others, and to foster the penetration of beauty."
“Charge to the Seniors” - Leonard Bernstein at Rockford College, June 5, 1966