The Last Days of Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein. Photo courtesy Stage+

By John Rockwell

Although Leonard Bernstein, the famed American composer and conductor who died on Sunday evening in his Manhattan apartment, had been ill for months, he remained alert and inquisitive and looked forward to resuming his composing and perhaps even his conducting careers.

While he had announced his retirement from the concert stage earlier in the week, his death came as a sad surprise, according to hints from his inner circle of relatives and friends. Spiritually, he remained the youthful Lenny, ebullient and zestfully alive, that audiences had loved for nearly 50 years.

Bernstein's family, manager, physician and press representative have declined public comment on his last months. According to his physician, Dr. Kevin M. Cahill, Bernstein died of a heart attack brought on by ''progressive emphysema complicated by a pleural tumor and a series of pulmonary infections,'' as he had described the conductor's condition earlier in the week.

Cigarettes to the End

That emphysema had been a longstanding condition, and for years he had also suffered from asthma attacks and bouts of bronchitis. At a memorial service in 1986 for Alan Jay Lerner, Bernstein's admirers held up a sign saying, ''We love you - stop smoking.'' But despite all the illnesses and the urgings, he couldn't stop, right up to his death.

''The great thing about conducting,'' he said at the time, ''is you don't smoke and you breathe in great gobs of oxygen.''

This spring and summer, however, Bernstein's smoking and his habit of socializing with students, friends and fellow musicians until the early hours of the morning began to catch up with him. ''Lenny is the only conductor I have ever seen,'' one orchestra official remarked this summer, ''who simultaneously gasps into a respirator and lights up a cigarette the minute he comes off the stage.’”

Published at The New York Times, October 16, 1990