Guest Essay: Our Dad, Leonard Bernstein, Would Want His Music Played at the Kennedy Center
The New York Times
By Jamie Bernstein, Nina Bernstein Simmons, and Alexander Bernstein
May 2, 2025
Our father, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, liked to tell us about the time Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis called to ask him to be the first executive director of the Kennedy Center in Washington, which was being built as a memorial to her slain husband. He was so honored that he blurted out a yes — then hung up aghast. He didn’t feel remotely suited to be executive director of anything.
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How Bradley Cooper Wove My Parents’ Truth into the Fabric of Maestro
By Jamie Bernstein - TIME
December 20, 2023
Five years ago, my dad would have turned 100. The Leonard Bernstein Centennial was a pretty big deal—but I didn’t really grasp the scope of my father’s impact until I started traveling around the country giving talks about my memoir, Famous Father Girl, which came out that same year. Everywhere I went, I met scores of older people who had been there: at Carnegie Hall, at Tanglewood, at the Kennedy Center, and beyond. They’d bought the records; they knew his Broadway shows. The Lenny fan base lives!
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Sit Tight
Music and Lyrics by Jamie Bernstein
September 10, 2020
I recently listened to a song I wrote that I made a home demo of, back in the late 90's -- and it was so oddly resonant with our current times that the tune got stuck, badly stuck, in my head. I woke up in the middle of the night imagining images for the song... the next day I invited my niece Anna to help me over this weekend to make a music video. And we did it!
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Second and Third Thoughts on Tom Wolfe
By Jamie Bernstein - The Nation
June 1, 2018
He was blithely unaware of how his journalistic cutting edge sliced one family into ribbons—mine.
Such an outpouring of encomiums for Tom Wolfe upon his death—the long obits, the lavish photos of his sartorial snappiness… it has all made me a little queasy.
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Bernstein Music Sparkles as Young Musicians Lead
By Jamie Bernstein - Classical.org
April 3, 2018
Editor’s note: In this post, Jamie Bernstein blogs about two weeks of sparkling Bernstein performances from Chicago, Colorado Springs, New York City, Washington DC, Scottsdale, and Memphis — many of which featured inspiring young musicians.
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Three Concerts, Two Coasts, One Super Weekend
By Jamie Bernstein - Classical.org
February 12, 2018
Getting from New York City to Philadelphia is a breeze. In a little over an hour, the train pulled into beautiful, be-vaulted 30th St. Station.
I settled into my hotel room, directly opposite the clock tower atop Philadelphia’s famously beautiful City Hall. From my window perch on the 10th floor, I could have contemplated the ornamentation and sculpture for hours! But, I had a date with my young friend Juliana to grab an early tapas dinner (they have great food in Philly) and then bustle the few blocks in the freezing wind to Verizon Hall to catch the Philly Pops concert, which was devoted entirely to a celebration of Bernstein at 100.
The conductor was our longtime pal David Abell, who worked with our dad back in the day and has been a lifelong Leonard Bernstein (LB) booster. (He was fresh off the plane from having conducted “Songfest” in London the week before.)
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Me, Too — And I Let It Happen
By Jamie Bernstein - The Huffington Post
October 23, 2017
This is what women my age used to do back then...
How uncannily connected they were, those two recent headlines: the death of Hugh Hefner, closely followed by the spectacular undoing of Harvey Weinstein. It was a kind of double obituary (one hopes) for the image of that 20th century American man of success, and the delicious perquisites that adorned his achievement.
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The Time My Parents ‘Took A Knee’ For The Black Panthers
By Jamie Bernstein - Huffington Post
October 18, 2017
The word “shitstorm” had not yet been coined, but that is what the situation became.
When we fret over the intense polarization in our culture today; when we shrink from the shrill tones of TV news and social media; when we despair over the callousness of the White House toward issues of race, police brutality and peaceful protest ― we might gain insight from looking back a handful of decades to see how similarly divided we were in another era.
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Coda: The Performance I Can't Forget
By Jamie Bernstein - Opera News
May 2015
What made it all so difficult for my brother, sister and me was that blurry, blurry line between work of art and life.
A Quiet Place came as a sequel of sorts to my father Leonard Bernstein’s 1951 opera, Trouble in Tahiti. T in T, as we call it, was my father’s processing of his own parents’ unhappy marriage. By the time I was old enough to notice, my grandparents seemed to me like a pretty mellow elderly couple. But my father had recounted growing up in an atmosphere of dinner-table acrimony, squabbles over money, icy silences. The names of the T in T couple were originally Sam and Jennie — his parents’ names. Later, he changed Jennie to Dinah — his grandmother’s name. I wonder what his parents thought of T in T; no record exists of their reaction.
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Moab Rim
By Jamie Bernstein
How did time pass
Before time was kept:
Did seconds make
The same chain gang trudge –
Was one chill dawn distinct
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Drive
By Jamie Bernstein
Driving up the Merritt
Late tonight in
A firm resolution of rain
Wipers on max
Glimpses of clarity
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Poetry Class Reflux
By Jamie Bernstein
Early, like me,
She arrives for class but,
Unlike me, armed
With a hamburger. It looks good;
I missed lunch. Lately
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The Tug of Havana
By Jamie Bernstein
The crumble the make-do
The gummed defunct wires
That lattice the weeping plaster
The grime-bathed marble
Still cool to the touch
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