On the Road and Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein: My Years with the Exasperating Genius Audiobook (Free)

Compiled by his former assistant and having a foreword by Broadway legend Harold Prince, this book celebrates Leonard Bernstein’s centenary with a romantic and detailed look at the public and private life from the Maestro.

Leonard Bernstein reeked of inexpensive cologne and obviously hadn’t showered, shaved, or slept in some time. Was he drunk on top of that? He greeted his brand-new associate with ‘What are you consuming?’ Yes, he was drunk.

Charlie Harmon was hired to manage the day-to-day parts of Bernstein’s about On the Road and Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein: My Years with the Exasperating Genius lifestyle. There was one extra responsibility: make sure Bernstein met the deadline for an opera commission. But things kept getting in the way: the centenary of Igor Stravinsky, intestinal parasites picked up in Mexico, teaching all summer season in Los Angeles, a baker’s dozen of teenagers, plus despair, exhaustion, insomnia, and cut-throat games of anagrams. Do the opera obtain written?

For four years, Charlie saw Bernstein each day, as his social director, gatekeeper, valet, music copyist, and itinerant orchestra librarian. He loaded (and unpacked) Bernstein’s umpteen pieces of luggage, got the Maestro to his concerts, held him occupied changing planes in Zurich, Anchorage, Tokyo, or Madrid, and discovered steps to make little talk to mayors, ambassadors, a chancellor, a queen, and a Hollywood legend or two. How could anyone absorb all those people and areas? Because there was music: late-night piano duets, or the Maestro’s control to accompany an audition, or, by the way, the greatest orchestras in the globe. Charlie achieved it, and this is what it had been like, told for the first time.