Dinner with Lenny

The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

Jonathan Cott

Includes never-before-seen material about Lenny Bernstein
Provides glimpse of conductor's memories of a lifetime in music
Features dazzling array of black and white photos from throughout Bernstein's career

Dinner with Lenny

The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

Jonathan Cott

Description

Leonard Bernstein was arguably the most highly esteemed, influential, and charismatic American classical music personality of the twentieth century. Conductor, composer, pianist, writer, educator, and human rights activist, Bernstein truly led a life of Byronic intensity—passionate, risk-taking, and convention-breaking.

In November 1989, just a year before his death, Bernstein invited writer Jonathan Cott to his country home in Fairfield, Connecticut for what turned out to be his last major interview—an unprecedented and astonishingly frank twelve-hour conversation. Now, in Dinner with Lenny, Cott provides a complete account of this remarkable dialogue in which Bernstein discourses with disarming frankness, humor, and intensity on matters musical, pedagogical, political, psychological, spiritual, and the unabashedly personal. Bernstein comes alive again, with vodka glass in hand, singing, humming, and making pointed comments on a wide array of topics, from popular music ("the Beatles were the best songwriters since Gershwin"), to great composers ("Wagner was always in a psychotic frenzy. He was a madman, a megalomaniac"), and politics (lamenting "the brainlessness, the mindlessness, the carelessness, and the heedlessness of the Reagans of the world"). And of course, Bernstein talks of conducting, advising students "to look at the score and make it come alive as if they were the composer. If you can do that, you're a conductorand if you can't, you're not. If I don't become Brahms or Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky when I'm conducting their works, then it won't be a great performance."

After Rolling Stone magazine published an abridged version of the conversation in 1990, the Chicago Tribune praised it as "an extraordinary interview" filled with "passion, wit, and acute analysis." Studs Terkel called the interview "astonishing and revelatory." Now, this full-length version provides the reader with a unique, you-are-there perspective on what it was like to converse with this gregarious, witty, candid, and inspiring American dynamo.

Dinner with Lenny

The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

Jonathan Cott

Dinner with Lenny

The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

Jonathan Cott

Author Information

Jonathan Cott, editor and contributor, Rolling Stone magazine

Jonathan Cott is the author of sixteen previous books, including Conversations with Glenn Gould; Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer; Dylan (A Biography); and Back To A Shadow In The Night: Music Writings and Interviews - 1968-2001. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone since the magazine's inception, Cott has also written for The New York Times and The New Yorker. He lives in New York City.

Dinner with Lenny

The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein

Jonathan Cott

Reviews and Awards

"The interview is replete with a generous helping of the boast and bombast which was Bernstein's stock-in-trade, which one either loves or hates ... The account makes riveting reading." - Classical Music

"Rarely has a composer or conductor enjoyed such public adulation, and this lovely little book goes some way towards explaining why Bernstein did. A transcription of the "last long interview" with him, conducted in the year before his death, it captures Bernstein on sparkling form... Dinner with Lenny is an evocative tribute, not just to Bernstein's musical gifts but his ever-active mind." - The Financial Times

"[In Dinner with Lenny] ancedotes flow freely as the casual obscenities and gushing Yiddish emoting. The most telling quip comes in Cott's perceptive introduction: just before a concert at the Vatican, followed by an audience with the Pope, a well-wishing friend sent Bernstein a telegram: 'Remember: the ring, not the lips.'" - The Spectator

"Jonathan Cott is gifted at making a discussion - presented in the formatting of a play script, with occasional stage directions - feel like a live recording, while we wander from fascinating reflections about languages, the mystic number seven, and Hitler's effect on 20th-century music, to lovely anecdotes such as the one about Bernstein's late wife washing the eccentric Glenn Gould's hair." - The Independent on Sunday

"Lenny is witty, erudite, epigrammatic and wicked - filled with off-the cuff reminiscences about friends, colleagues and reflection on major composers." - The Times

"What Cott has achieved, though this final interview, is to make Lenny speak and sing again. It's been said that if you remember an evening with Lenny, you weren't really there. The genius of Cott's book is not only to remember but to recall with pinpoint accuracy and sympathy the flame of Leonard Bernstein that burned so brightly and so true." - New Statesman

"A feast" - New York Times

"I found this terrific book quite impossible to put down ... Here is a vibrant and authentic Leonard Bernstein, speaking freely, frankly and extremely entertainingly, but never wavering in his raging passion for music, or his simple lust for life." - International Record Review