“That was one of the spookier aspects of Leonard Bernstein: his external personality did not match his internal ambition. In the public eye and in the imagination of the press, he was flamboyant, excessive, and narcissistic. “Lenny” was what we would now call a party animal, making the rounds of social gatherings, smiling, joking, drinking, smoking, and posing jocularly for the popular media. In private, he was deadly serious about music, ideas, the flow of history, the fate of humanity, and he thought－no, he knew－that he could play a role in the latter. Bernstein was a radical in the pure sense: he took ideas to their logical, if sometimes necessarily extreme ends, and refused to allow opinion or prestige to interfere with his conclusions.”

“And this is it, the thing we’ve been looking for, the thing Bernstein said was at the heart of everything he composed. This is faith. Not belief in God or a creed, not being able to rest assured that a heavenly Father is looking out after our interests, but the knowledge that meaning is inherent in human experience. Music －tonal music, for all music is tonal or at least we necessarily hear it as such －is an emblem of this inherent meaning that persists in all things, not just music. Music is the very symbol of faith, the experiential proof that existence is not, despite claims to the contrary by the Existentialists, void of meaning until we give it some. The meaning is there, waiting. It will differ from person to person, exactly as one composer’s music differs from all others, but it is there, in the way we experience reality.”

Kenneth Lafare, Experiencing Leonard Bernstein

大二樂史課讀到這段對於Leonard Bernstein的剖析摘抄了下來 自此一直心裡有對於他的無法用文字表達的「理解」在看這部電影的時候再次被喚醒。那種複雜和矛盾 關於「愛」人和愛音樂。

教堂裡的馬勒二 Bradley Cooper收下我的膝蓋 甩凱特大魔王一百條街的指揮。還有片尾的真實片段 他是真的懂伯恩斯坦。