Leonard Bernstein Signed and Framed Photograph to Adolph Green

Signed and inscribed photograph to Adolph Green and Phyllis Newman, Christmas 1959

INSCRIPTION

“For beloved Adolph and Phyllis — A glorious 1960! Love, Lenny. Xmas ’59”

DESCRIPTION

A Christmas present from Bernstein to his lyricist Adolph Green and Green’s wife, the actress and singer Phyllis

Newman. The print shows Bernstein at work, baton in hand, in a dark sweater. It is housed in a dark leather easel

frame with gilt-tooled borders of the period; whether Bernstein or the Greens chose the frame is unknown, though

a bare 8 × 10 would have been an unlikely Christmas gift, and the frame is consistent with the print having been

presented in it. Leather shows wear at the corners; the print and inscription are clean and strong.

CONTEXT

The photograph was inscribed at the close of one of the great years of Bernstein’s life. He was in his second

season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, fresh from the orchestra’s triumphant 1959 tour of

Europe and the Soviet Union, where Burton describes Moscow music-lovers mobbing him just to touch him.

Simon & Schuster had published his first book, The Joy of Music, that November, and the family had just bought

its first country house in Connecticut. For the Greens, 1960 would indeed be glorious: it was the year Adolph and

Phyllis married.

Green was no ordinary friend. Burton traces the relationship to the summer of 1937 at Camp Onota in the

Berkshires, where Bernstein, the camp’s young music counselor, cast Green as the Pirate King in The Pirates of

Penzance. By 1939 Bernstein was living in Green’s East Ninth Street sublet while Green performed with the

Revuers at the Village Vanguard; On the Town and Wonderful Town followed. The Greens remained part of the

small inner circle the Bernsteins dined with regularly, living a few blocks apart, and Green and Newman were

among the last friends to visit the Dakota in October 1990.