Like the sweeping passion of his most beloved songs—Maria and Somewhere from West Side Story (1957)—Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) captured the unnamable and unknowable with music that stirred the soul.

“I can't live one day without hearing music, without playing it, studying it, or thinking about it,” said the flamboyant maestro. With his self-described “eclectic” style, he blended classical and popular music into something uniquely his own.

“Technique is communication,” he explained. “The two words are synonymous in conductors.”

Born Louis Bernstein on this day in Lawrence, Massachusetts, his family brought home a piano when he was ten—and everything changed. He played jazz and blues, and developed a gift for creating dramatic rhythms. In 1958, he became Music Director of the New York Philharmonic—the oldest and most prestigious American orchestra.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bernstein led a historic Christmas performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on both sides of the wall. “My life is, I think, dedicated to communication, to sharing the wonder of experience with other people.”

His legacy lives on. Mass, his monumental celebration of faith and music, was written for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971 and revived by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2004.