Icon: Leonard Bernstein

Bernstein overflowed with so much musical energy and he distributed pleasure so widely that only a man of his yawning ambition could be disappointed in himself. But he signaled his insecurities so persuasively that the rest of the world, too, wanted him to do more. He was the first American-born conductor of international stature, the incarnation of his country’s cultural maturity. He was the smooth populist, as articulate about music as he was with it, and in his “Young People’s Concerts” he showed that television could give everyone the tools to listen to Mozart. It helps, when listening to Bernstein’s concert music, to visualize him as a conductor, caught in one of his distinctive poses of podium ecstasy: head thrown back as if he were being blown by gusts of music, arms outstretched as if to offer a great bear hug to the moment, to music, to the world. Bernstein composed with that same full-body delight in the stuff of music, and his most ambitious scores sound as if he could not bear to leave anything out.