Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was the first conductor born and educated in the United States of America to receive world-wide acclaim. He is perhaps best known for his long conducting relationship with the New York Philharmonic, which included the acclaimed Young People's Concerts series, and his compositions including West Side Story, Candide, and On the Town. He is known to baby boomers primarily as the first classical music conductor to make many television appearances, all between 1954 and 1989. Additionally he had a formidable piano technique and was a highly respected composer. He is one of the most influential figures in the history of American classical music, championi

If you like author Leonard Bernstein here is the list of authors you may also like

Buy books on Amazon

Total similar authors (29)

Giacomo Puccini

An Italian composer, son of Michele Puccini and fifth in a line of composers from Lucca. After studying music with his uncle, Fortunato Magi, and with the director of the Insituto Musicale Pacini, Carlo Angeloni, he started his career at the age of fourteen as an organist of St. Martino and St. Michele, Lucca, and at other local churches. However, a performance of Verdi's Aida at Pisa in 1876 made such an impression on him he decided to become an opera composer. With a scholarship and financial support from an uncle, he was able to enter the Milan Conservatory in 1880. During his three years there, his chief teachers were Bazzini and Ponchielli.

Punccini's best known operas are: Le villi (1884), Edgar (1889), Manon Lescaut (1893), La Boheme
Buy books on Amazon
Sophocles

Sophocles (497/496 BC-406/405 BC), (Greek: Σοφοκλής ; German: Sophokles , Russian: Софокл , French: Sophocle ) was an ancient Greek tragedian, known as one of three from whom at least one play has survived in full. His first plays were written later than, or contemporary with, those of Aeschylus; and earlier than, or contemporary with, those of Euripides. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost fifty years, Sophocles was the most celebrated playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens which took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia
Buy books on Amazon
Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.
Buy books on Amazon
Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Tanizaki Prize, Yomiuri Prize for Literature, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Noma Literary Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
Growing up in Ashiya, near Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the
Buy books on Amazon
Vladimir Nabokov

Russian: Владимир Набоков .

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery, and had a big interest in chess problems.

Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that characterized all his works.

Lolita was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels; Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list, and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed ei
Buy books on Amazon
Alan Jay Lerner

American playwright and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner wrote a number of musicals, including Brigadoon (1947) and My Fair Lady (1956), with the composer Frederick Loewe.

This librettist in collaboration created some of the most popular and enduring works of theater of the world for the stage and on film. He won three Tony awards and three academy awards among other honors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Ja...
Buy books on Amazon
Virginia Woolf

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Buy books on Amazon
Peter Shaffer

Sir Peter Levin Shaffer was an English dramatist, author of numerous award-winning plays, several of which have been filmed.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sh...
Buy books on Amazon
François Truffaut

François Roland Truffaut was an award-winning and influential filmmaker, critically acclaimed worldwide. He was also a talented and sought-after film critic in France (most notably, his work for Cahiers du Cinema), and one of the founders of the French New Wave and the auteur theory; he remains an icon of the French film industry. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he was also a screenwriter, producer or occasional actor in over twenty-five films.
Buy books on Amazon
Aaron Copland

Works of American composer Aaron Copland include the ballets Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944), which won a Pulitzer Prize, any of several awards that, conferred annually for accomplishment in various fields of American journalism, literature, and music, Joseph Pulitzer established.

His musical works ranged from orchestral to choral and movie scores. For the better part of four decades, people considered Aaron Copland the premier.

From an older sister, Copland learned to play piano. He decided his career before the time he fifteen years in 1915. His first tentative steps included a correspondence course in writing harmony. In 1921, Copland traveled to Paris to attend the newly founded music school for Americans at Fontaineble
Buy books on Amazon
Federico García Lorca

Born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5 1898; died near Granada, August 19 1936, García Lorca is one of Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poets and dramatists. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with Machado as one of the two greatest poets Spain has produced in the 20th century, and he is certainly Spain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age.
Buy books on Amazon
Kenny Werner

Kenny Werner is an American jazz pianist, composer, and author.
Buy books on Amazon
Neil Simon

Marvin Neil Simon was an American playwright and screenwriter. He wrote more than 30 plays and he received more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer. He was one of the most reliable hitmakers in Broadway history, as well as one of the most performed playwrights in the world. Though primarily a comic writer, some of his plays, particularly the Eugene Trilogy and The Sunshine Boys, reflect on the twentieth century Jewish-American experience.
Buy books on Amazon
Lillian Hellman

Lillian Florence "Lilly" Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American dramatist and screenwriter famously blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–52.

Hellman was praised for sacrificing her career by refusing to answer questions by HUAC; but her denial that she had ever belonged to the Communist Party was easily disproved, and her veracity was doubted by many, including war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and literary critic Mary McCarthy.

She adapted her semi-autobiographical play The Little Foxes into a screenplay which received an Academy Award nomination in 1942.

Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Ham
Buy books on Amazon
Jon Fosse

Jon Olav Fosse was born in Haugesund, Norway and currently lives in Bergen. He debuted in 1983 with the novel Raudt, svart (Red, black). His first play, Og aldri skal vi skiljast, was performed and published in 1994. Jon Fosse has written novels, short stories, poetry, children's books, essays and plays. His works have been translated into more than forty languages. He is widely considered as one of the world's greatest contemporary playwrights. Fosse was made a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite of France in 2007. Fosse also has been ranked number 83 on the list of the Top 100 living geniuses by The Daily Telegraph.

He was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayabl
Buy books on Amazon
Arthur Laurents

Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, librettist, stage director, and screenwriter. His credits included the stage musicals West Side Story and Gypsy and the film The Way We Were.
Buy books on Amazon
Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out,
Buy books on Amazon
Paul Auster

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Le
Buy books on Amazon
Oliver Sacks

Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE, was a British neurologist residing in the United States, who has written popular books about his patients, the most famous of which is Awakenings, which was adapted into a film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.

Sacks was the youngest of four children born to a prosperous North London Jewish couple: Sam, a physician, and Elsie, a surgeon. When he was six years old, he and his brother were evacuated from London to escape The Blitz, retreating to a boarding school in the Midlands, where he remained until 1943. During his youth, he was a keen amateur chemist, as recalled in his memoir Uncle Tungsten. He also learned to share his parents' enthusiasm for medicine and entered The Queen's College, O
Buy books on Amazon
Charles King

Charles King is a New York Times-bestselling author and a professor at Georgetown University. His books include EVERY VALLEY (2024), on the making of Handel's Messiah, which was a New York Times Notable Book; GODS OF THE UPPER AIR (2019), on the reinvention of race and gender in the early twentieth century, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award; MIDNIGHT AT THE PERA PALACE (2014), on the birth of modern Istanbul, which was the inspiration for a Netflix series of the same name; and ODESSA (2011), winner of a National Jewish Book Award.
Buy books on Amazon
Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen was a major Norwegian playwright largely responsible for the rise of modern realistic drama. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama." Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors and one of the most important playwrights of all time, celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians.

His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe and any challenge to them was considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many contemporaries.

Ibsen largely founded the modern stage by introducing a critical eye and free inquir
Buy books on Amazon
Alex Ross

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote for the New York Times. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was published in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and became a national bestseller. It won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Royal Philharmonic Society Creative Communication Award; appeared on the New York Times's list of the ten best books of year; and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the Samuel Johnson prizes. Ross has received a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center, fe
Buy books on Amazon
Liz Cheney

Elizabeth Cheney Perry, commonly called Liz, is an American attorney. During the George W. Bush administration years, she held positions in the State Department of the United States. She has been politically active on behalf of the Republican Party and is a co-founder of Keep America Safe.

She is the elder daughter of former Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney and Lynne Cheney.
Buy books on Amazon
M.L. Stedman

M.L. Stedman was born and raised in Western Australia and now lives in London. The Light Between Oceans is her first novel.
Buy books on Amazon
Harold C. Schonberg

Harold Charles Schonberg was an American music critic and journalist, most notably for The New York Times. He was the first music critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (1971). He was the author of a number of books on musical subjects, and also one on chess.
Buy books on Amazon
Alan Walker

Alan Walker’s definitive three-volume biography of Liszt, Franz Liszt, received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography and the Royal Philharmonic Society Book Award, among others. His writing has appeared in journals such as The Musical Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, and Times Educational Supplement. A professor emeritus at McMaster University, Walker was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1986 and was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 2012.
Buy books on Amazon
Richard Wagner

Germanic legends often based romantic operas of especially known composer Richard Wagner, who worked Tannhäuser (1845) and the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (1853-1876).

From 1872, Richard Wagner lived at Bayreuth to 1883 and designed the opera house, used chiefly for performances of his works.

Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).

Wilhelm Richard Wagner conducted, directed theater, and authored essays, primarily for his later called "music dramas." Unlike most other greats, Wagner wrote the scenario and libretto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard...
Buy books on Amazon
Gioachino Rossini

Numerous operas of Italian composer Gioacchino Antonio Rossini include The Barber of Seville (1816) and William Tell (1829) (see William Tell).

Le Barbier de Séville (1775), the comic play and best-known work of French writer Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, inspired Gioacchino Antonio Rossini to opera.

Gioachino Antonio Rossini gained fame for his 39 works and wrote many songs, some chamber music, piano pieces, and some sacred. He set new comic and serious standards and, still in his thirties, afterward retired on large scale at the height of his popularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gioachi...
Buy books on Amazon
Gaetano Donizetti

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848) was an Italian composer. Along with Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, Donizetti was a leading composer of the bel canto opera style during the first half of the nineteenth century. Donizetti's close association with the bel canto style was undoubtedly an influence on other composers such as Giuseppe Verdi.

Donizetti was born in Bergamo in Lombardy. Although he did not come from a musical background, at an early age he was taken under the wing of composer Simon Mayr who had enrolled him by means of a full scholarship in a school which he had set up. There he received detailed training in the arts of fugue and counterpoint. Mayr was also instrumental in obtaining a place
Buy books on Amazon