Leonard Bernstein’s career-long involvement with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra intersected with the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, and the growth of television. He first conducted the Philharmonic in 1943, at age twenty-five, and his term as music director (1958−69) is remembered as a particularly vibrant period in the orchestra’s history. On taking over that role, Bernstein embarked on an ambitious agenda both for thematic programming, including focuses on American music and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, and for public-facing initiatives, such as the televised Young People’s Concerts and touring. In addition, Bernstein used his position to highlight the work of solo performers who were members of minority groups, and he oversaw the orchestra during its period of racial integration.

The atmosphere of innovation and experimentation in the 1960s was not lost on Leonard Bernstein. His advocacy for the Mahler symphonies, for instance, was highly influential to a generation of composers excited by Mahler’s stylistic heterogeneity. Indeed, one of the best-known examples, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, was dedicated to Bernstein and a New York Philharmonic commission. Bernstein also collaborated with two other mavericks of that decade: the pianist Glenn Gould and the composer John Cage. With the former, Bernstein led a much-understood but controversial performance of the Brahms first piano concerto; with the latter, he created a programme with the Philharmonic about what he called aleatoric music, including a performance of Cage’s indeterminate work Atlas Eclipticalis. These encounters were of immense importance to all three artists.

Gustav Mahler’s impact on Leonard Bernstein’s career is undeniable. Empathizing with Mahler’s dual role as conductor and composer, Bernstein commented that both he and Mahler led double lives. Bernstein continued emphasizing his connection to Mahler, notably in an essay entitled ‘Mahler: His Time Has Come’. Ultimately, his appreciation of Mahler’s music spanned a lifetime and Bernstein eagerly advocated for recognition of Mahler’s genius. This chapter focuses on three events during Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic years that illustrate the importance of Mahler to Bernstein’s tenure: the 1960 Mahler Festival, the 1963 death of John F. Kennedy, and the 1967 Mahler symphonic recordings. Although these three events are in no way all-encompassing of Bernstein’s efforts to reintroduce Mahler to the world, they outline the trajectory of the New York Philharmonic throughout the 1960s and show how Bernstein educated and inspired his audiences to a new appreciation of an old composer.

This is an examination of Leonard Bernstein’s impact as conductor and musical advocate. He was a champion of the works of Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler at a time when their work was unfashionable, bringing them to a much larger audience. The American composer he admired most was Aaron Copland, whose ’Connotations’ he led to open Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He was not in sympathy with most ‘12 tone’ music but did lead avant-garde works by the composers Lukas Foss, Elliott Carter, John Cage, and others. He conducted the world premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Turangalila Symphony’ in Boston in 1949 but never presented it again. He was an adept Straussian but only led the works composed before World War I. This was also his favourite period of Stravinsky’s work, although he added the three symphonies to his repertory in later years. On television, he led studies of rock and jazz. He conducted and recorded much of the standard repertory from the nineteenth century onwards, with only a few forays into Baroque and Classical-era music, with a particular emphasis on Haydn. There is some discussion of Bernstein’s podium manner and the conductors he influenced.

From the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Britons were in thrall to German composers. In 1940, music editor Ralph Hill complained of ‘the fanatical worship of the public as well as the average professional musician for the German tradition’. Instead of any unified Austro-German tradition, this was Britain negotiating a changing set of stylistic currents, played off against other continental identities and shifting ideas of old and new. Before the First World War, British musicians considered Austrians and Germans wardens of traditional styles (Brahms) as well as promulgators of modernism (Strauss and Schoenberg). British composers after Elgar, among them Holst and Vaughan Williams, responded directly to French exemplars and to the emerging folk revival. With Britten and other British composers of the 1930s, there was a marked shift of allegiance away from the musical ‘Hun’ – apart from an increasing interest in Mahler. By the later 1950s, ‘The Hun’ had ceased to be an entity for UK music lovers. Indeed, the Britain-vs.-the-continent duality was already moribund when the young Manchester group brought homegrown rather than continental modernism to London in 1956.

As we look back on Strauss’s long and prodigious career, it might all seem to be the inevitable product of superlative technique and talent – so much so that we might overlook the people who contributed to Strauss’s career and legacy from his days as a child prodigy to the recording studio decades after his death. This chapter takes stock of a wide range of figures who helped to set Strauss along his professional path, including aunts, uncles, and other extended family, his father Franz, the conductors Hans von Bülow, Franz Wüllner, Ernst von Schuch, Gustav Mahler, Franz Schalk, Hans Knappertsbusch, Karl Böhm, and Clemens Krauss, and singers Maria Jeritza, Lotte Lehman, Richard Mayr, Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, and Elisabeth Schumann. In various ways, some direct and others indirect, these champions contributed to the success and legacy of one of Germany’s most enduring composers.

Richard Strauss’s death on September 8, 1949 marked the end of an era. With his passing, the dominance of the conductor-composer was no more. With his great contemporaries, Gustav Mahler and Felix Weingartner, Strauss helped to shape the musical landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to pave the way for subsequent generations of conductors to build on their interpretative reforms and performance practices. This chapter investigates the ways in which Strauss interacted professionally with conducting colleagues, their early training, their rise through the ranks of the music profession, their approaches to programming, their management of orchestral musicians and singers (within both the rehearsal and performance environments), their physical gestures on the podium, their fee structures, and their interpretative practices when realizing works from the Central-European Canon.

This chapter explores the environment of programmatic music-making that centered on the so-called “progressive” composers Liszt, Wagner, and their acolytes, contextualizes the ongoing debates between absolute music and program music that they occasioned, and considers various programmatic compositions outside of that narrow tradition. It gives particular attention to the forty-year period between the appearance of most of Liszt’s symphonic poems and Strauss’s tone poems, in which Hans von Bronsart, Hans von Bülow, Alexander Ritter, Felix Draeseke, and other students of the New German School sought to develop tenets of program music with limited success. Just as integral to the success of program music were the sites and contexts of its performance, as Vienna, Paris, Madrid, and New York welcomed and rejected program music in equal measure. These circumstances shaped Strauss to be a composer open toward, but also healthily suspicious of, program music and its past practitioners.