I was introduced to Leonard Bernstein’s work in my mid-20’s (a while ago now) when a friend gave me an ‘Essential Bernstein’ CD; I’d only ever seen snippets of ‘West Side Story’ up to that point. It was a CD I listened to often at the time and continue to now when the mood takes me.

Yet still I knew next to nothing about the man until I saw Douglas Tirola’s excellent documentary ‘Bernstein’s Wall’.  The name comes from the concert Bernstein participated in to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and serves as a metaphor for the walls he built and came to knock down in his own life.

It’s difficult to cover a 72-year life in a little over 100 minutes; actually, it’s impossible, and this documentary doesn’t seek to do that. Instead, it provides the sense of him as a person and as an artist. It’s like a beautiful tasting menu of the life of a genius. In many ways, it reminded me of Brett Morgen’s film about Bowie ‘Moonage Daydream’ from 2022.

The major connection between ‘Moonage Daydream’ and ‘Bernstein’s Wall’ is that in both films, the directors chose to use their subjects’ own words to tell their own stories. Both films feel autobiographical. We hear very little from others in ‘Bernstein’s Wall,’ and the film is composed largely of interviews with Bernstein, footage of him at work, and letters written by and to him.

Comparisons can also be made between Bowie and Bernstein with regard to their private lives, their relationships with their fathers and their partners, as well as their exalted places as musicians in the twentieth century, but both were also fiercely socially aware. Something I had no idea of when it came to Bernstein. For example, I didn’t know he’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and denied a passport. I didn’t know that he marched in Selma with Dr Martin Luther King and Harry Belafonte. I also didn’t know that ‘elegant slumming’ was a term coined by the New York Times when they reported on Bernstein and his wife Felicia hosting a gathering for the Black Panther movement in 1970.

This was a man who had no problem using the status born from his talent to propel causes into the limelight; he was self-aware enough to accept his ‘celebrity’ status and the responsibilities and privileges that came with it.

This documentary flows like a symphony with the enigmatic Bernstein mesmerising to watch and endlessly engaging to listen to. And of course, the music is sublime.