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LC Launches Leonard Bernstein Centennial Celebration with Thousands of Bernstein Items Online

“In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, the Library of Congress has made available online—for the first time—musical manuscripts and scrapbooks from the legendary composer’s personal and professional archives housed in the nation’s library. These digital offerings and others nearly tripled the existing content at loc.gov/collections/leonard-bernstein/about-this-collection/. The public can now access for free more than 3,700 items, including photos, writings, correspondence, scripts, musical sketches, scrapbooks and audio recordings. This web presentation is a revealing snapshot of Bernstein’s extensive collection at the Library…The Bernstein Collection consists of an estimated 400,000 items, one of the largest and most varied in the Library’s Music Division. In addition to music and literary manuscripts, personal correspondence, audio and video recordings, fan mail, business papers, photographs and datebooks, there are unexpected items that range from passports and license plates to batons and the suit in which Bernstein conducted his New York Philharmonic debut in 1943. Also among these unusual items are Bernstein’s notes for a Holocaust opera (tentatively titled “Babel”) he was working on the year of his death; a manuscript for an unproduced circa 1941 ballet, “Conch Town” that included the music for what became “America” from “West Side Story”; and a seven-page, color-illustrated letter to his mother documenting a trip to Israel during the 1948 war…”

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