Leon Botstein

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American conductor, educator (born 1946)

title: "Leon Botstein" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1946-births", "living-people", "american-male-conductors-(music)", "american-expatriates-in-israel", "american-musicologists", "heads-of-universities-and-colleges-in-the-united-states", "bard-college-faculty", "academic-staff-of-central-european-university", "harvard-university-alumni", "jewish-american-musicians", "jewish-musicologists", "the-high-school-of-music-&-art-alumni", "swiss-jews", "swiss-emigrants-to-the-united-states", "bard-college", "university-of-chicago-alumni", "21st-century-american-conductors-(music)", "members-of-the-american-philosophical-society", "bartók-scholars", "beethoven-scholars", "berg-scholars", "brahms-scholars", "mahler-scholars", "mendelssohn-scholars", "schoenberg-scholars", "wagner-scholars"] description: "American conductor, educator (born 1946)" topic_path: "arts" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Botstein" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary American conductor, educator (born 1946) ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox officeholder"]

FieldValue
nameLeon Botstein
imageLeon Botstein conducting.jpg
captionBotstein in 2010
occupationScholar, Conductor, Educator
officePresident of Bard College
term_start1975
predecessorReamer Kline
birth_date
birth_placeZürich, Switzerland
spouseBarbara Haskell
children4
educationUniversity of Chicago (BA)
Harvard University (MA, PhD)
website
relativesDavid Botstein (brother)
signatureLeon Botstein Signature.jpg
::

| name = Leon Botstein | image = Leon Botstein conducting.jpg | caption = Botstein in 2010 | occupation = Scholar, Conductor, Educator | office = President of Bard College | term_start = 1975 | term_end = | predecessor = Reamer Kline | successor = | birth_name = | birth_date = | birth_place = Zürich, Switzerland | death_date = | death_place = | spouse = Barbara Haskell | children = 4 | education = University of Chicago (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD) | website = | relatives = David Botstein (brother) | signature = Leon Botstein Signature.jpg

Leon Botstein (born December 14, 1946) is a Swiss-born American conductor, educator, historical musicologist, and scholar serving as the President of Bard College since 1975.

Biography

Botstein was born in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1946. The son of Polish-Jewish physicians who escaped Nazi persecution, Botstein immigrated to New York City at the age of two. He studied violin with Roman Totenberg and, during the summers, studied with faculty from the National Conservatory in Mexico City.

In 1963, at age 16, Botstein graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1967 with a bachelor's degree in history. While an undergraduate, he was concertmaster and assistant conductor of the university orchestra and founded its chamber orchestra. His music teachers in college included composer Richard Wernick and the musicologists H. Colin Slim and Howard Mayer Brown. In 1967, after studying at Tanglewood, Botstein attended Harvard University, where he studied history under David Landes, writing on musical life of Vienna in the 19th and early 20th centuries, earning an MA in 1968. At Harvard, he was the assistant conductor of the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra and conductor of the Doctors' Orchestra of Boston.

In 1969, while a graduate student, Botstein was awarded a Sloan Foundation Fellowship and began work for New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration as special assistant to the president of the Board of Education of the City of New York. In 1970, at age 23, Botstein became the youngest college president in history after being appointed president of the now-defunct Franconia College in New Hampshire. He was offered the position after meeting his future father-in-law, Oliver Lundquist, who was on the board of trustees.

President of Bard College

In 1975, Botstein left Franconia to become the president of Bard College, a position he still holds. He oversaw significant curricular changes, and, under his leadership, Bard saw record gains in enrollment, campus growth, endowment, institutional reach, and high-profile faculty. Botstein directed the launch of the Levy Economics Institute, a public-policy research center, as well as graduate programs in the fine arts, decorative arts, environmental policy, and curatorial studies; soon thereafter, he helped acquire Bard College at Simon's Rock and later founded Bard High School Early College, which operates in seven cities: Newark, New York City, Cleveland, Washington D.C., Baltimore, New Orleans, and Hudson.

In the wake of the death of his second child, an 8-year-old daughter, Botstein decided to return to the musical career he had begun at University of Chicago. In 1985, he completed his Ph.D. in music history at Harvard and began retraining as a conductor with Harold Farberman, eventually leading the Hudson Valley Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra.

1990–present: Festivals, international programs, and conducting

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Fisher_at_Bard_College.jpg" caption="Prison Initiative]], which established college-in-prison programs across the country and is now active in nine states."] ::

In 2003, following the success of the Bard Music Festival, Botstein developed Bard SummerScape, a festival of opera, theater, film, and music, where, since its founding, he has revived 13 rare operas in full staging. Later that year, Botstein became the music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. His concerts with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra were broadcast in regular series across the U.S. and Europe, and he led the orchestra on several tours, including twice across the U.S. and to Leipzig to open the 2009 Bach Festival with a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah in Bach’s Thomaskirche. In 2011, he stepped down from that post and became the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra's Conductor Laureate and, as of 2022, also serves as its Principal Guest Conductor. In addition to his work with the ASO and JSO, Botstein has performed or recorded with, among many others, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, New York City Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, and NDR Symphony Orchestra. In 2005, his recording of Gavriil Popov’s First Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra was nominated for a Grammy Award.

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/"Intolerance"Performed_by_the_American_Symphony_Orchestra_at_Carnegie_Hall(26711512508).jpg" caption="access-date=2021-02-22}}"] ::

Botstein also turned his attention to developing Bard's music program. In 2005, he oversaw the development of The Bard College Conservatory of Music and later became director of The Bard Conservatory Orchestra. During this period, he also helped Bard acquire the Longy School of Music, and led The Bard Conservatory Orchestra on tours of China, Eastern Europe, and Cuba. In addition to conducting for the Youth Orchestra of Caracas in Venezuela and on tour in Japan, Botstein also helped develop Take a Stand, a national music program in the U.S. based on principles of El Sistema. In 2015, he founded The Orchestra Now, a pre-professional orchestra and master’s degree program at Bard College; in addition to performing multiple concerts each season at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, The Orchestra Now performs a regular concert series at Bard's Fisher Center and takes part in Bard Music Festival concerts.

In 2016, Botstein received $150,000 as a donation to Bard College from the foundation Gratitude America, which was founded by financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. At the time, Botstein was on the charity's advisory board. Botstein donated it all to Bard College as part of a $1 million gift he gave that year, with the rest of his donation coming from his personal savings and earnings.

In 2018, Botstein was appointed artistic director of Campus Grafenegg in Austria, where he collaborated with Thomas Hampson and Dennis Russell Davies. On January 23, 2020, he was named chancellor of the Open Society University Network, of which Bard College and Central European University are founding members.

In 2019, Botstein appeared in the documentary College Behind Bars, a four-part television series about the Bard Prison Initiative, a degree program offered to inmates in New York prisons. The series was produced by his daughter, Sarah Botstein, who works for Ken Burns's documentary production company.

Musicianship

Botstein is renowned for reviving and promoting neglected repertoire and composers. In addition, as director of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, he emerged as a significant proponent of "thematic programming", which assembles concert programs around common themes grounded in literature, music history, or art. He is also known for the series "Classics Declassified", in which he lectures, conducts, and takes questions from the audience. Both the Bard Music Festival and Bard SummerScape continue his method of reviving neglected works and synthesizing performance and scholarship. The Wall Street Journal Barrymore Laurence Scherer wrote, "the Bard Music Festival…no longer needs an introduction. Under the provocative guidance of the conductor-scholar Leon Botstein, it has long been one of the most intellectually stimulating of all American summer festivals and frequently is one of the most musically satisfying. Each year, through discussions by major scholars and illustrative concerts often programmed to overflowing, Bard audiences have investigated the oeuvre of a major composer in the context of the society, politics, literature, art and music of his times."

Scholarship and writings

Botstein's scholarship focuses on the intersection of music, culture, and politics since the early 19th century. He has written books including Judentum und Modernitaet and Von Beethoven zu Berg: Das Gedächtnis der Moderne (2013) and The History of Listening: How Music Creates Meaning (2000).

In addition, he is coeditor of Vienna: Jews and the City of Music, 1870-1938, published in 2004, and editor of The Complete Brahms: A Guide to the Musical Works of Johannes (1999).

Botstein's essays for The Bard Music Festival are published as a series in the Princeton University Press. He has been editor of The Musical Quarterly since 1993 and a frequent contributor to periodicals focusing on music and history.

Botstein also writes frequently on primary and secondary education and universities: in addition to the book Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (1997), he is the author of numerous articles on education in the United States.

Personal life

Botstein is the brother of biologist David Botstein and pediatric cardiologist Eva Griepp. Both of his parents were physicians who, after emigrating to the U.S., served on faculty of the Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

He is the husband of art historian Barbara Haskell. They have two children.

Botstein and his first wife, Jill Lundquist, are the parents of two children, one of whom is Sarah Botstein, who produced the documentary College Behind Bars.

Awards

::data[format=table]

TitleYear
Honorary Doctor of Science, Watson School of Biological Sciences, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory2018
Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Goucher College2017
Honorary Doctor of Music, Sewanee: The University of the South2016
Lifetime Achievement Award - YIVO Institute for Jewish Research2015
The Deborah W. Meier Hero in Education Award - Fairtest2015
Caroline P. and Charles W. Ireland Distinguished Visiting Scholar Prize - University of Alabama at Birmingham2014
Jewish Cultural Achievement Award - The Foundation for Jewish Culture2013
Kilenyi Medal of Honor - The Bruckner Society of America2013
The University of Chicago Alumni Medal2012
Leonard Bernstein Award for the Elevation of Music in Society2012
Elected to the American Philosophical Society2010
Carnegie Academic Leadership Award - The Carnegie Corporation, for outstanding leadership in curricular innovation, reform of K-12 education and promotion of strong links between their institution and their local community.2009
Popov's Symphony No. 1 and Shostakovich's Theme and Variations with the London Symphony Orchestra - nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Orchestral Performance.2006
Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters2003
Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art2001
Harvard Centennial Medal by the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to recipients of graduate degrees from the School for their "contributions to society".1996
National Arts Club Gold Medal1995
::

Books

Selected articles, essays, and chapters

Selected recordings

References

References

  1. (2005). "Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines". University Press of Mississippi.
  2. "Leon Botstein".
  3. [http://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2009/05/29/profile-leon-botstein/ Profile: Leon Botstein], ''Hadassah Magazine'', "Botstein is a proud secular Jew not ambivalent or defensive about his identity. In I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl (Jewish Lights), he writes: "In Judaism, learning is prayer, for it celebrates the human capacity for language and thought." He waxes nostalgic for the days of "exceptional Jewry," arguing that "Jews have entered the indistinguishable middle class…. We are no longer the people of the book; we are a people of ordinary vulgarity. The real tragedy of American Jewry—and Israel—is that we've used privilege to become absolutely ordinary.""
  4. (October 4, 1992). "The Most Happy College President: Leon Botstein of Bard". The New York Times.
  5. (July 6, 2011). "Interview with Leon Botstein: 35 Years (and Counting) as President of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY".
  6. "2024 Great Immigrants". Carnegie.
  7. "Orchestrating a career: College president, conductor, and writer: for Leon Botstein, work is a three-part harmony.".
  8. Gregory, Alice. (2014-09-22). "The Duke of Bard".
  9. "BIOGRAPHY".
  10. Wilson, Robin. (1997-10-10). "In a 22-Year Career, Bard's President Radically Transforms College's Mission". The Chronicle of High Education.
  11. "Music and its public : habits of listening and the crisis of musical modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914".
  12. (August 20, 1998). "From Gehry, A Bilbao on The Hudson". The New York Times.
  13. Goldberger, Paul. (2 June 2003). "Artistic License Two great new cultural centers open out of town".
  14. (8 June 2025). "'Guntram' Review: In Concert at Carnegie, Strauss's First Opera". The New York Times.
  15. "Leon Botstein".
  16. Woolfe, Zachary. (July 19, 2013). "An Opera Known for Obscurity, Plucked From the Shadows". [[The New York Times]].
  17. (March 12, 2006). "Professor Botstein in the Promised Land". The New York Times.
  18. Brown, Emily Freeman. (August 20, 2015). "A Dictionary for the Modern Conductor". Scarecrow Press.
  19. (November 19, 2019). "Artist: Leon Botstein". Grammy Award.
  20. [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/world/middleeast/15quds.html Palestinian Campus Looks to East Bank (of Hudson)], ''New York Times'', February 14, 2009
  21. [http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/12/11/the-other-scott-horton-8/ Scott Horton Interviews The Other Scott Horton] {{webarchive. link. (2011-02-20 , ''[[Antiwar.com#Antiwar Radio). Antiwar Radio]]'' (Dec. 11, 2010)
  22. "CEU | About CEU & Budapest".
  23. "History".
  24. (September 7, 2014). "A Missionary for Liberal Arts". The New York Times.
  25. "Open Society University Network Launched With $1 Billion Gift".
  26. (January 8, 2015). "Los Angeles Philharmonic embarking on new El Sistema initiative".
  27. "NATIONAL TAKE A STAND ORCHESTRA: YOUTH ORCHESTRA OF THE EAST". Fisher Center.
  28. "About The Orchestra Now". bard.edu.
  29. (May 17, 2023). "Bard President Received $150,000 From Foundation Created by Jeffrey Epstein". The New York Times.
  30. Briquelet, Kate. (May 17, 2023). "Epstein Transferred Thousands of Dollars to Noam Chomsky, Leon Botstein: Report".
  31. Safdar, Khadeeja. (May 17, 2023). "Jeffrey Epstein Moved $270,000 for Noam Chomsky and Paid $150,000 to Leon Botstein".
  32. (2023-05-17). "Bard President Received $150,000 From Foundation Created by Jeffrey Epstein (Published 2023)".
  33. "George Soros Announces Global Initiative to Transform Higher Education".
  34. "Leon Botstein".
  35. "Sarah Botstein".
  36. Davis, Peter. (July 22, 2009). "Wagner's Anxiety of Influence". The New York Times.
  37. Scherer, Barrymore. (August 5, 2009). "Undeniable Influence". Wall Street Journal.
  38. Berman, Daphna. (December 10, 2004). "The Money-making Music Man". [[Haartez]].
  39. Adler, Margot. (January 24, 2009). "Botstein Revives The East German Avant-Garde". NPR.
  40. Tommasini, Anthony. (November 16, 2016). "A Symphony With Powerful Champions, but Often Overlooked". The New York Times.
  41. Cooper, Michael. (February 16, 2015). "Bard SummerScape to Feature Work of the Composer Carlos Chávez". The New York Times.
  42. (2011-01-21). "Leon Botstein". Stanford University Libraries.
  43. "ASO".
  44. (2012-04-19). "Princeton University Press Books in The Bard Music Festival". Press.princeton.edu.
  45. Matthews, David. (January 27, 2012). "Refuge in the Forest". Times Literary Supplement.
  46. Appel, Jacob. (January 15, 2004). "Leon Botstein: The Maestro of Annandale". Education Update.
  47. "NCTQ: About: Board of Directors: Clara Haskell Botstein".
  48. (May 2009). "Profile: Leon Botstein".
  49. (27 April 2018). "Watson School 2018 Ph.D.s".
  50. "Commencement".
  51. Sewanee: The University of the South. "Top Stories Homepage - Gowns awarded, honorary degrees conferred during Convocation - Sewanee: The University of the South".
  52. "90th Anniversary Gala".
  53. Shannon Thomason. "UAB - UAB News - UAB presents Leon Botstein, 2014 Ireland Distinguished Visiting Scholar, on March 13".
  54. "www.abruckner.com".
  55. "artsandletters.org". artsandletters.org.
  56. "Hungary's xenophobic attack on Central European University is a threat to freedom everywhere".
  57. (February 8, 2017). "American Universities Must Take a Stand". The New York Times.
  58. "Bard president draws parallels between European anti-Semitism and American racism to explain Trump's win".
  59. (December 13, 2016). "The Election Was About Racism Against Barack Obama".
  60. (August 12, 2016). "Why the Next President Should Forgive All Student Loans".
  61. "Can Music Speak Truth to Power?".
  62. Leon Botstein. (24 March 2014). "How an Anti-Semitic Composer Created 'Kol Nidre' and 'Moses'". The Forward.
  63. Leon Botstein. (1 August 2014). "Book Review: 'Mad Music' by Stephen Budiansky & 'Charles Ives in the Mirror' by David C. Paul". The Wall Street Journal.
  64. Leon Botstein. (1 June 2013). "Resisting Complacency, Fear, and the Philistine: The University and its Challenges". The Hedgehog Review.
  65. Leon Botstein. (14 January 2003). "The Merit Myth". The New York Times.
  66. Leon Botstein. (24 January 2001). "We Waste Our Children's Time". The New York Times.
  67. Leon Botstein. (19 September 2000). "What Local Control?". The New York Times.
  68. Liran Gurkiewicz. (5 March 2025). "Conductor Leon Botstein honors unsung composer Josef Tal".
  69. "TŌN {{!}} New Album “Classics of American Romanticism” Now Available".

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