Many people have missed the real significance of Leonard Bernstein as musician and man. His spectacular success in his early 20's as a last minute substiture conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra gave shooting-star brilliance to the start of his fabulous career. But Arturo Toscanini had done much the same thing at 19.

Leonard Bernstein was no infant prodigy. He came to the study of music at the age of ten when an aunt found his family's living room piano. He was not the first as a composer to bridge the gap between the music of the concert hall and that of musical theater. Georgge Gershwin had done that before him. He was not the first to bring the serious and inviting appeal of music to a great audience through a mass medium. Walter Damrosch had done that on radio when Leonard Bernstein was a boy. He was not the first both to conduct, from the podium and the piano, and to to compose. He was not the first to combine successfully the concentration and difficulties of the professional musician with a happy, healthy home life.

Here in a sister's story, however, the reader learns how Leonard Bernstein became America's first native born, home trained conductor of a major symphony, and how he put all his various talents together into a career the story of which reads like fiction. Here are years of serious doubt by his father as to advisability of his son's musical career, the time of Leonard Bernstein's self doubts, the problems of what to do first-conduct, compose, perform-and what to do most. Here are glimpses behind the scenes into the often hectic life of Leonard Bernstein: a ballet score written with composer and choreographer exchanging ideas by tape recordings sent by mail, by telegrams, and by long distance calls; a musical comedy score worked on in train compartments and hospital beds; the mad rush to complete a symphony for a prize competition deadline; the rigors of traveling to Israel via enemy Egypt; the initial suspicion and rapid acceptance by musicians and audiences abroad. Here too is the warmth and humor of relaxation at home with wife and children; canasta in an airport limousine; a concert on the site of an archaeological dig.

Shirley Bernstein, his sister, who has shared many of his successes from those as teenage impresario to those as adult virtuoso, who has also shared the dark times and doubts, gives the reader the inside story of the most spectacularly successful musical figure of our time. She adds, too, the warm and human reactions of the unseen audience from Nova Scotia to Florida to California and Japan toward this Pied Piper who has led young people and old into the wonderful world of music.

From the book