Contents of the home studio in Fairfield, Conn., where Leonard Bernstein composed will be displayed in a re-creation of the room at Indiana University in Bloomington.
The items run from the deeply meaningful to the banal. They include Bernstein’s stand-up composing table; a conducting stool that may have been used by Brahms, given as a gift by the Vienna Philharmonic; an electric pencil sharpener; a telephone; an ashtray and disposable lighters; 39 Grammy-nomination plaques; and a piece of the Berlin Wall. (Bernstein conducted an international orchestra in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony near site of the wall shortly after it was taken down.)
“It meant so much to us as kids, just being in that room all the time, in that studio, playing with all the little objects,” said Alexander Bernstein, the composer’s son. “He was so fine with us hanging around there even while he was working.” Bernstein also had two daughters, Jamie and Nina.
The objects come from a small building constructed from a kit at on the grounds of the Bernstein family’s country house in Fairfield, Conn. Bernstein, who died in 1990, composed much of the music from the last three decades of his life there, including the “Kaddish” Symphony; “Arias and Barcarolles”; the theater piece “Mass”; the ballet “Dybbuk”; and the opera “A Quiet Place.”
Bernstein collaborators, like Stephen Sondheim, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, John Guare and Stephen Wadsworth, also passed through the studio, Alexander Bernstein said.
“I can see him standing there for hours, orchestrating,” he said of his father. Bernstein also had a studio at the Dakota on Central Park West, where the family had an apartment. But most of his composing took place at the Fairfield house, which remains in the Bernstein family.
Some objects will go on temporary display soon at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington. The school is building a new complex, and the room may be installed there or in current administrative offices, Alain Barker, a school spokesman, said. Items would be placed “in substantially the same arrangement” as existed in the Fairfield studio, he added. The university hopes the full display will be open next year.
