Seven of Leonard Bernstein’s Lovers

Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was famous not only for his compositions and performances but for his love of people and his wide-ranging love life.

Dimitri Mitropoulos

Dimitri Mitropoulos

In late 2023, Bradley Cooper released a biopic called Maestro, which charts Bernstein’s life, with a special focus on his relationship with his wife Felicia.

However, Bernstein was a gay man (which Felicia knew before marrying him). With her knowledge, he had crushes on and relationships with many men over many decades. In one way or another, all of those men impacted his career.

Today, we’re looking at the stories of seven of Bernstein’s lovers and how they changed his life.

Dimitri Mitropoulos (ca. 1935-1940)

When he was a sophomore at Harvard, Bernstein met forty-one-year-old conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos at a campus party.

Dimitri Mitropoulos conducts New York Philharmonic in rehearsal and concert

The electrically charismatic Mitropoulos had made his American debut the previous year with the Boston Symphony and was on the edge of a major career. Bernstein was fascinated by his full-body commitment to conducting, and Mitropoulos was likewise taken by Bernstein.

Mitropoulos was gay and, somewhat unusually for the time, steered clear from marrying for appearances. He viewed music as his primary love: a kind of spiritual calling that transcended the need for attachments in the physical world.

The week after he met Bernstein, Mitropoulos traveled to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he had a concert to give with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Ten days later, he was hired to be that orchestra’s fourth music director.

Over Christmas 1938, Bernstein came to visit Mitropoulos in Minnesota. While he was there, Mitropoulos suggested that Bernstein come work in Minneapolis as his protege after his graduation in 1940.

Bernstein was thrilled with the plan, until he got an apologetic telegram: “Don’t leave your class for next season. Some difficulties here… Am very awfully sorry.”

The “difficulties” Mitropoulos was referring to were Minneapolis labor residency laws making Bernstein’s employment impossible. Not to mention the fact that the board was hesitant to hire a total unknown to be the orchestra’s assistant conductor.

“I received a wire from Dimitri that knocks my world completely to hell,” Bernstein wrote to a friend.

Their relationship cooled. After his tenure in Minneapolis, Mitropoulos was named co-conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1949 and sole conductor in 1951.

The Legacy of Dimitri Mitropoulos

However, his music directorship was cut off at the knees in the late 1950s. He had a love of new music that audiences didn’t share, a soft-spoken personality that led to people not taking him seriously, and enemies in the press. To add insult to injury, rumours about his sexuality were spreading.

Worse, there was a pro-Bernstein movement growing. During the 1957-58 season, he became co-conductor of the Philharmonic with Bernstein, but sharing the position proved to be an untenable arrangement. He died in Italy a few years later while conducting Mahler.

Aaron Copland (1937-1940)

Aaron Copland with Leonard Bernstein, ca 1940

Aaron Copland with Leonard Bernstein, ca 1940

As a college student, Leonard Bernstein became obsessed with Aaron Copland’s challenging Piano Variations…so much so that, despite its technical demands and dissonances, he started playing it at parties.

On 14 November 1937, when he was nineteen, Bernstein went to a dance recital at the Town Hall in New York City. While in the audience, he met Aaron Copland for the first time.

Bernstein had imagined Copland being an old man with a long white beard “like Whitman”, but in reality, Copland was relatively young and incredibly charming.

That night happened to be Copland’s 37th birthday. He was holding a party for himself and he invited Bernstein to his loft in the Upper West Side. Of course, Bernstein sat down at the piano and played the Copland Piano Variations. Copland was impressed, and the two soon became very close.

Copland conducts El Salon Mexico, New York Philharmonic

Bernstein once called Copland his “only real composition teacher.” He helped open the door for Bernstein to be granted a leadership position at the Tanglewood Music Festival, where Bernstein would work for half a century.

Copland was discreet about his gay relationships, but his pattern was to casually date young, talented men for a period of time, then move on to another talented young companion. Even after they’d passed this stage, though, Copland and Bernstein remained good friends and colleagues.

Their correspondence is lively and frank. In 1943, Bernstein wrote Copland a letter with the salutation “Aaron, my love.” In it, he describes his extensive social life (“all night affair, and I very drunk”) and sighs about having “found a new boyfriend (married, Goddam [sic]”). “All very confusing,” he summarised, “& I still love D.O,” a reference to clarinettist David Oppenheim. Copland was in Hollywood working on soundtracks at the time. Bernstein said, “My love to [movie star] Farley Granger. Can you fix us up? Write soon. I love you.”

Farley Granger (1949)

Farley Granger

Farley Granger

Leonard Bernstein and Farley Granger met in the mid-1940s in California. Granger and Copland had become friends during the latter’s stint in Hollywood.

In his memoir Include Me Out, Granger recalls how, during a visit to New York, he went to the Philharmonic to watch Bernstein conduct. Afterward, the two went out together and stayed out late.

The following day, Bernstein picked Granger up and drove him to a shingled house in the country. Granger was surprised to see Aaron Copland open the door; Bernstein had arranged the luncheon. After a gourmet meal on the patio, the three retired inside for the afternoon, and Granger listened to Copland and Bernstein play piano duos.

In 1949, Granger and Bernstein reconnected. Granger was in the Tanglewood audience when Bernstein conducted Copland’s Appalachian Spring. (Copland provided a running commentary about Bernstein’s interpretative choices.)

Afterwards, Bernstein asked Granger back to his place for a “midnight supper” and then to stay over. “We had a couple of glorious days and nights together. He was as passionate and enthusiastic a lover as he was a conductor,” Granger wrote.

Bernstein asked Granger to come with him to South America; Granger declined, as he was under contract to film the movie Side Street. They continued to be friends even after parting ways romantically.

Side Street (1950) Trailer

David Oppenheim (1940-1950s)

David Oppenheim and Leonard Bernstein

David Oppenheim and Leonard Bernstein

David Oppenheim was born in 1922, moved to New York when he was thirteen, and became a clarinettist. He met Bernstein in 1940 while studying at Tanglewood, and Bernstein was so impressed with him that he dedicated a clarinet sonata to him, which they recorded together after Oppenheim returned from the war in 1943. They were good friends and lovers.

The following year, Bernstein met his future wife Felicia Montealegre at a party. The two dated on and off for a while.

In 1948, Oppenheim married actress Judy Holliday (a woman who Bernstein had also considered marrying).

Later, when Bernstein and Felicia married in September 1951, Oppenheim was on hand at the wedding, serving as best man.

Oppenheim later branched out into other artistic endeavours. In the 1950s, he directed the Masterworks division of Columbia Records; in the 1960s, he worked as a producer for CBS; and in the 1970s and 1980s, he served as dean of NYU (the New York University School of the Arts).

Oppenheim is played by Matt Bomer in Bradley Cooper’s 2023 Bernstein biopic Maestro.

Felicia Montealegre (1951-1978)

Felicia Montealegre and Leonard Bernstein

Felicia Montealegre and Leonard Bernstein

Felicia Montealegre was born in 1922 in Costa Rica to a Costa Rican mother and an American father.

In 1944, she started studying piano in New York with Claudio Arrau, as well as acting. She met Bernstein at a party given by Arrau in 1946. They got engaged, then broke up. After the interlude with Granger, Bernstein and Montealegre became engaged again, and they were married in September 1951.

Person to Person, hosted by Edward Murrow – Leonard & Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (1955)

Montealegre understood Bernstein’s sexual orientation and famously wrote to him in a letter around the time of their marriage, “You are a homosexual and may never change — you don’t admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?”

They had three children together. They didn’t always stay together – there was a period in the 1970s when Bernstein decided he wanted to live apart from her and with his lover Tom Cothran – but in the end, they did get back together, and Bernstein was together with Montealegre when she died of lung cancer in June 1978.

Tom Cothran (1976)

Tom Cothran

Tom Cothran

Tom Cothran was the director of a San Francisco classical music radio station when he met Leonard Bernstein in 1971.

Cothran soon became Bernstein’s boyfriend, as well as his secretary. He assisted Bernstein with researching the six-lecture-long lecture series “The Unanswered Question” at Harvard that Bernstein gave in 1973. These lectures were widely distributed, including on PBS in America and the BBC in the United Kingdom.

Bernstein: The Twentieth Century Crisis · Ives: “The Unanswered Question”

By the summer of 1976, Cothran was telling Bernstein that he should leave Felicia and move in with him. The two men spent the summer in California, and in mid-September, they moved to New York. By October, news of the implosion of the Bernstein marriage was general knowledge.

In January 1977, Bernstein and Cothran moved to Palm Springs together, but Bernstein ultimately decided that he didn’t want to be long-term domestic partners with Cothran. By June of 1977, he returned to New York and Felicia.

Soon after their reconciliation, Felicia was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer after a previous remission. She died a year later. Bernstein was devastated, feeling that his abandonment of her had contributed to her illness.

He still stayed friends with Cothran. They even contemplated writing an opera together based on Lolita, but were never able to get the project off the ground.

In 1980, Cothran was diagnosed with lymphoma and then AIDS. He died in 1986, and Bernstein visited his deathbed.

Kunihiko Hashimoto (1979-1990)

Kunihiko Hashimoto and Bernstein

Kunihiko Hashimoto and Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein met Kunihiko Hashimoto in 1979. He was on tour in Japan with the New York Philharmonic, and Hashimoto was working at an insurance company. After the concert, Hashimoto went backstage to meet Bernstein, and the two ended up spending the night together. Bernstein was sixty-one and Kunihiko was twenty-six.

As soon as Bernstein left Tokyo, Hashimoto began missing Bernstein desperately, so they stayed in contact. Their relationship was not monogamous, but they continued it until Bernstein’s death eleven years later.

Bernstein’s manager offered Hashimoto the job of being Bernstein’s representative in Japan. In 1985, he played a pivotal role in organising the Hiroshima Peace Ceremony, in which Bernstein conducted the European Community Youth Orchestra in Beethoven and his own “Kaddish” symphony.

Leonard Bernstein conducts “Leonore Ouverture Nr 3” and his “Kaddish” in Hiroshima August 6, 1985

That year Bernstein also embarked on a tour around the world to promote nuclear disarmament. He said on Good Morning America about the tour, “I hope it does some good to grant us the wisdom that war is obsolete and that we should stop all this nonsense once and for all.” Hashimoto was vital in arranging these concerts.

The two kept their relationship very quiet. It was only really confirmed after Japanese scholar Mari Yoshihara discovered their letters in the Library of Congress.

One of Hashimoto’s letters to Bernstein reads, “I never forget that you asked me where we should live. Your question was where ‘we’ should live, wasn’t it? I would like to live with you. Even as a maid (but I am not good at cooking and sewing). Even as a secretary (but I cannot type quickly). Even as like a doll (but I have a mind) … I was born to meet you and to be with you.”

A book about the letters was published in late 2019, finally bringing their relationship to light. They remind us that every musician, no matter how famous, is capable of keeping many secrets about their personal lives.

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