Sneak Peek: Rob Kapilow on Leonard Bernstein's Broadway Career

Robert Kapilow: There’s a famous quote from Duke Ellington who says, “There’s only two kinds of music, good music and the other kind,” and I think one of Bernstein’s greatest gifts, which still remains there today as a legacy, is this belief that the divisions that we make between kinds of music are arbitrary. Bernstein spoke all languages of music equally fluent. He was a native speaker in jazz, he was a native speaker in popular music and classical music, and though for him to go from a Mahler symphony one day to conduct on a Broadway show was nothing, at the time it was literally inconceivable. There had never been anything like it. And the truth is, though now he’s revered as an icon he suffered a lot during his career from that. Many critics couldn’t take him seriously; they just didn’t believe that someone who wrote a hit Broadway show and who could play jazz could possibly be a fantastic conductor of Mahler, Bach and Beethoven.