“Didn’t you like it?”

Leonard Bernstein and Mildred Spiegel attended the Boston Symphony Orchestra season in 1933.

They sat, she remembers, in the second balcony “under one of the male Greek nude statues.” One evening, during a standing ovation for the orchestra’s music director, Serge Koussevitzky, Lenny “just sat there” clapping very softly. “What’s the matter,” I asked, “didn’t you like it?” “Not like it? I love it! That’s the trouble. I’m just jealous of any man who can make music like that.”

H. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, London, Faber & Faber Ltd, 2017, p. 57.


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