If someone’s really fortunate, they’ll have a moment in life that defines what they want to do for the rest of it. According to Meryle Secrest’s “Leonard Bernstein: A Life,” Leonard Bernstein had his moment in 1937, when he was spending the summer working as a counselor at Massachusetts’s Camp Onota. He already knew that he loved music; he’d already taken lessons and found his talents, but he would later write that it was one day that season that he saw the power that music could truly have, as it drifted over a group.
Music, he’d write, was pretty standard fare at that time, and one of his jobs was to play the background music on the days when parents would visit. That summer was also when one of his idols died at a shockingly young age: George Gershwin passed away on July 11, while undergoing surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor, and Bernstein said when he heard, “I was absolutely devastated.”
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For that day’s music, he first announced to the room that Gershwin had died, then started to play one of his works. The normal background chatter stopped, and he recalled, “That was the first inkling I ever had of the power of music, of its possibilities for control. It was a great turning point for me. Perhaps the most theatrical thing in the world is a room full of hushed people, and the more people … are silent, the more dramatic it is.”
