During a wonderful visit with Marin and Ira Allen, the conversation turned to Maestro, the new biopic about Leonard Bernstein. Ira mentioned that Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts of the late 1950s and ‘60s are on YouTube.
Today I watched and listened to the first two, which I probably had watched with my parents.
The second one, “What Is American Music?”, was a mix of great music, good entertainment, and insightful analysis. But also occasional myopic ethnocentrism -- much of which Bernstein may have begun to recognize as embarrassing in his later years, as we moved toward the end of the 20th Century.
What strikes me the most, now in December 2023, was Bernstein’s 1958 exuberant optimism about a diverse, yet increasingly unified, America. I suspect that that optimism was shared by most of his viewers (including my family sitting in a small apartment on Quebec Terrace in Silver Spring). While we knew we had a long way to go, we were confident we would get there. I hope someday such optimism will be more warranted than it is now.
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