The moment bright young (30) Leonard Bernstein finished reading Poet W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety, "a baroque eclogue" in a Third Avenue bar (TIME, July 21, 1947), he felt a "compulsion" to compose a symphony based on it. For two years, on his busy rounds of baton waving and piano playing, he scribbled away from Taos to Tel Aviv, "in planes, in hotel lobbies." Last week Lennie's Symphony No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra was ready.
As Boston's matinee audience filed into Symphony Hall for a first hearing, Lennie was worried. His...
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