On November 14, 1943, a 25-year-old assistant conductor was told that Bruno Walter had the flu and that he would lead the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall with no rehearsal, on live national radio, in music by Strauss and Wagner. This episode traces how Leonard Bernstein, born Louis Bernstein in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Russian Jewish immigrants, went from a father who refused to pay for piano lessons to the front page of the New York Times.

The hosts cover the synagogue cantor who first moved him, the aunt’s upright piano that landed in the house, the neighborhood lessons he taught for pennies, his Harvard thesis on jazz, blues, and spirituals in American music, and the birthday party where he played Aaron Copland’s piano variations for Copland himself. They follow his double life as music director of the New York Philharmonic and composer of On the Town, Wonderful Town, and West Side Story, the Young People’s Concerts on television, his marriage to Felicia Montealegre and the letters showing she knew of his homosexuality from the start, his activism and FBI file, and the Mahler score placed over his heart at burial.

• Why an immigrant father who built a permanent-wave machine business saw music as a road back to poverty
• The tritone as the recurring signal of gang danger in West Side Story
• Long-form musical analysis on prime-time television, and why the hosts call him the Carl Sagan of classical music
• Concerts as statements: Mahler after Kennedy’s assassination, Mount Scopus after the Six-Day War, Ode to Freedom in Berlin
• The Black Panther fundraiser, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic, early AIDS advocacy, and the Praemium Imperiale prize money that founded Artful Learning