Announcement of Addition of Leonard Bernstein Papers to American Memory Collections

[Danna Bell-Russel]

The following announcement is being sent to a number of lists. Please
accept our apologies for any duplicate postings.

The composer, conductor, writer, and teacher Leonard Bernstein
(1918-1990) was one of 20th-century America's most important musical
figures. Bernstein came to national prominence virtually overnight
through a last-minute conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic,
when he substituted for Bruno Walter on November 14, 1943. He was
twenty-five. Because Bernstein was a national figure from the very
beginning of his career, his friend and teacher Helen Coates, who became
his secretary in 1944, maintained his papers meticulously and
extensively annotated many of them.

The Library’s Bernstein Collection, acquired over a forty-four year time
span, offers a remarkably complete record of his life and is one of the
Music Division's richest repositories in the variety and scope of its
materials.  Its more than 400,000 items, including music and literary
manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, audio and video recordings,
fan mail, and other types of materials extensively document Bernstein's
extraordinary life and career.

The online Leonard Bernstein Collection makes available a selection of
85 photographs, 177 scripts from the Young People's Concerts, 74 scripts
from the Thursday Evening Previews, and over 1,100 pieces of
correspondence, in addition to the collection's complete Finding Aid.
Three categories have been included from the Personal Correspondence:
correspondence between Bernstein and his family; between Bernstein and
Helen Coates, his teacher, friend, and assistant for most of his
professional life; and between Bernstein and his two most significant
mentors, Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky.

Two Special Presentations highlight the online collection: one is the
Photo Gallery, containing all the online photographs arranged
chronologically; and “Professor Lenny” by Joseph Horowitz, an in-depth
article on Bernstein as music educator originally published in The New
York Review of Books.

The Leonard Bernstein collection can be found at the following url:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lbhtml/

Please direct any questions to ndlpcoll at loc.gov