1/4 "I don’t want to give in and settle for some specialty. I don't want to spend my life as Toscanini did, studying and restudying the same fifty pieces of music. It would bore me to death..."

[Leonard Bernstein by Al Hirschfeld, 1958; © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation.]

2/4 "...I want to conduct . I want to play the piano . I want to write for Hollywood . I want to write symphonic music . I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry ..."

3/4 "...And I think I can still do justice to them all. But I can’t do them all at once. I have to learn to do one at a time, and to give it all my strength until I’ve done it right..."

4/4 "...Mozart, Mendelssohn, Bach, Haydn -- they were all performers and conductors as well as composers, and they did a lot of other things too. Only then, there was time."
Leonard Bernstein, 1957