Laying bare a life less ordinary

The debut, with a repertoire that included difficult pieces from Robert Schumann, Miklos Rozsa, Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, was broadcast nationwide and resulted in the 25-year-old appearing on Page 1 of the next day's New York Times.

Bernstein was appointed music director of the philharmonic in 1959, as the first conductor born and educated in the United States to take the position.

Apart from the classical composition, Symphony No 2, The Age of Anxiety, he was also known for composing musicals, such as On the Town and West Side Story, operas including Trouble in Tahiti and Candide, theater works like Mass as well as the film score for On the Waterfront.

According to the Leonard Bernstein Office, more than 5,000 events took place worldwide last year to celebrate the maestro's centennial, including 37 in China.

One of them was a screening of West Side Story, which was accompanied by a live performance by the China Philharmonic Orchestra during the Beijing Music Festival in October.

On her fourth visit to China, Jamie Bernstein told China Daily: "I think my father's music is like a fingerprint for his personality. His music has so much variation and his personality was like that, too."

The young Bernstein frequently played the role of a guinea pig for her father's work, which she mentions in the book.

She was, as you would expect, immersed in music from a very young age, and she later devoted decades to narrating concerts and carrying on her father's musical and educational legacies until about three years ago, when Jamie Bernstein, now 67, finally took up the challenge of narrating her father's life from the perspective of a daughter.

And what a memoir it is. The reader not only experiences her father's flashing moments of brilliance and inspiration but also the occasional dismay at his failures and flops accompanied by his frequent mood swings. She also addresses the undulating happiness of her mother, Felicia Montealegre, and her struggles with being "Mrs Maestro".

According to Jamie Bernstein, the idea of the book was also to paint a picture of the era in which she grew up. It reminds her generation of their own youth, while providing younger readers a better sense of how things used to be, especially in the rich cultural environment of mid-20th century New York City.

As a child, being one of the Bernsteins was very much about the wealthy lifestyle-celebrities coming and going as frequent family guests, traveling a lot with their father and the privilege of meeting the Beatles, whom both she and her father were fond of.

However, she grew ambivalent to such things as her adolescence coincided with successive family upheavals, followed by the Bernsteins' interactions with the Black Panthers, her mother's sickness and rising melancholy, and her father coming out as gay.

The maestro, just like everyone else, went through ups and downs with his creative process and he courted controversy as he sought escape from the overwhelming realities of his life.

From the young Bernstein's perspective, though, the most difficult struggle for her was to find her own place in the musical sphere-the world that her father led her into from the very beginning of her life, but where she was destined to be unable to parallel his genius.