{"id":453,"date":"2024-02-02T01:31:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-02T01:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/2017\/11\/12\/leonard-bernsteins-asthma-and-heart-failure\/"},"modified":"2024-10-23T03:49:45","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T07:49:45","slug":"leonard-bernsteins-asthma-and-heart-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=453","title":{"rendered":"Leonard Bernstein’s Asthma and Heart Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LeonardOrchestra conductors often live very long lives, but Leonard Bernstein died at the young age of 72 from a heart attack and severe lung damage, probably brought on by his excessive smoking, drinking and promiscuity. He was one of America\u2019s greatest composers and conductors, a pianist, arranger, educator, author and television personality who wrote some of our best-loved musicals: West Side Story, Candide<\/em>, and On The Town<\/em>. He was the first American-born and American-trained conductor to be appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic and to conduct at Milan’s La Scala Opera House. He was married to an exceptionally beautiful woman, Felicia Montealegre, who was born in Chile and was an accomplished pianist, singer and actress, and the mother of his three children.<\/p>\n

Early Life and Education<\/strong>
\nHis father, Sam Bernstein, was a Ukranian whose goal of becoming a rabbi ended when his family emigrated to the United States in 1908, to avoid starvation. (My father also came to the U.S. at that time also to avoid extreme deprivation and the czar\u2019s extreme cruelty towards the Jews.) They settled in the Boston area where his father went from being a fish cleaner, to a janitor in a barbershop, to working for a wigmaker and eventually to owning a beauty supply store.\u00a0 Leonard got access to a piano at age 10 when his Aunt Clara divorced her husband and needed a place to store her upright piano. His father refused to pay for piano lessons, but Leonard played the piano anyway and was so good without lessons that his father gave him a baby grand piano for his Bar Mitzvah at age 13.<\/p>\n

Bernstein went to Boston Latin School and Harvard. I went to the same schools and had many of the same teachers, and when my classmates and I complained about how much we had to study, the teachers would remind us that at our age, Leonard Bernstein was editor of the school newspaper and a famous musician who also studied six hours a night, as we were expected to do. At Harvard he studied with Walter Piston, Edward Burlingame Hill and A. Tillman Merritt, and later with Helen Coates, Heinrich Gebhard, Isabelle Vengerova, Fritz Reiner and Serge Koussevitzky.<\/p>\n