Leonard Bernstein and His Young People's Concerts - by Alicia Kopfstein-Penk (Hardcover)

About the Book

In this first in-depth look at the series, Alicia Kopfstein-Penk illustrates how the cultural, social, political, and musical upheavals of the long sixties impacted Bernstein's life and his Young People's Concerts.

Book Synopsis

In this first in-depth look at the series, Alicia Kopfstein-Penk illustrates how the cultural, social, political, and musical upheavals of the long sixties impacted Bernstein's life and his Young People's Concerts.

Review Quotes

[Leonard Bernstein and His Young People's Concerts] is a bristlingly well-informed monograph that draws on Bernstein's archives to tell the story of how his Young People's Concerts telecasts came to be, and why they have had no true successors.

[The author] presents [Bernstein] to us as honestly and in as much detail as is humanly possible.

Alicia Kopfstein-Penk has written a thrilling and vivid account of the element in Leonard Bernstein's work that touched more Americans than anything else he did: the musical education--and inspiration, too--of an entire generation. The Young People's Concerts were at the heart of Leonard Bernstein's philosophy and this wonderfully researched book gives us the how and why of a splendid chapter in television history and Lenny's life. A marvelous piece of work. It is one of the best books about Bernstein I have ever read.


Alicia Kopfstein-Penk is a master of archival research. In her recent study of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts and their cultural significance she has painstakingly gone through a large body of material in rich detail. Her study is exhaustive and extensive, and will form the foundation for future scholarship on Bernstein and this important cultural legacy.


As this well-researched volume reveals, Bernstein's specific pedagogical contributions through the medium of television show how Bernstein engaged classical music as a tool for widespread pleasure, social change, and global unity. At once a biography of Bernstein and of the Young People's Concerts, Kopfstein-Penk's book uses analysis of the concerts and the musical performances within them to shine new light on Bernstein's life and career. The resulting dialogue...is fascinating and thought-provoking.

For the general public, the Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic were one of the highest-profile parts of Leonard Bernstein's remarkable career. The broadcasts have been considered by scholars for their educational content and value and as part of Bernstein's work with the orchestra, but, until now, little work had been done in terms of putting them in the broader contexts of Bernstein's life or the larger musical world. Alicia Kopfstein-Penk has done this beautifully in this study, combining dogged archival work in the Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bernstein bibliography and knowledgeable handling of related topics in American music, modern music, cultural contexts, and the medium of television. This fine work is the kind of study that needed to be written on Bernstein and the Young People's Concerts.


If one word can describe Kopfstein-Penk's work, it is 'complete.' The book is as much a history as it is a biographical volume on the pedagogical work of Leonard Bernstein. She provides hundreds of footnotes and eight appendices and leaves no stone unturned to tell the story of the Young People's Concerts.

Kopfstein-Penk proves to be a thorough interrogator of both process and product and the personalities involved. She is particularly revealing about the history and development of the concerts and in her examination of the challenges to key participants in meeting the plethora of conflicting cultural, social and political tropes that emerged in the long 1960s. No less dogged is her analysis of the content and reception of the individual programmes, the detail noted with an almost forensic exactitude. The result is a remarkable document of a remarkable series of documents and an invaluable addition to our deeper understanding of the multi-faceted Bernstein.

About the Author

Alicia Kopfstein-Penk is an enthusiastic postmodernist who teaches at American University. As a performer, she has sung Bernstein at the Metropolitan Opera, Beatles at clubs, and played classical guitar at the Kennedy Center. She is also a contributor to Soundboard, and a podcast producer for the Washington National Opera.