Montclair Film via Wikimedia Commons
Seymour Bernstein, the pianist, composer, and teacher whose Upper West Side studio apartment became a kind of pilgrimage site for musicians the world over, has died. He was 99.
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Bernstein died on Thursday at an assisted-living facility in Damariscotta, Maine, his friend Bill Finizio told The New York Times. He had moved to Maine full time a few years ago, but for more than half a century, the Upper West Side had been his anchor — a small studio apartment where he slept on a pullout sofa bed beside his grand piano, surrounded by scores, students, and artifacts that included a teakettle said to have belonged to Clara Schumann.Born in Newark on April 24, 1927, Bernstein discovered the piano at age 3 during a visit to an aunt’s house. He later told WNYC that hitting a few keys on her upright made him think, “I’ve discovered the secret of life.” He began lessons at 6 and was teaching young students himself by 15. He went on to study with Clifford Curzon in London, as well as Nadia Boulanger and Alexander Brailowsky.
Drafted during the Korean War, Bernstein borrowed a Yamaha from a local music school and gave concerts on the front lines, sometimes performing as shells flew overhead. He returned to South Korea repeatedly as a civilian, and during the 1960 April Revolution he had a piano moved into a hospital so he could play for students wounded in the protests against President Syngman Rhee.
His concert career took him through Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The Times called him “potentially a big talent” in the 1950s, and a 1969 Alice Tully Hall recital ran under the headline “Seymour Bernstein Triumphs at Piano.” But Bernstein was never at ease in the spotlight. He suffered from severe stage fright that no review could touch, and in 1977, at the age of 50, he gave his final public concert at the 92nd Street Y. The Times critic Joseph Horowitz, who didn’t know it was a farewell, called it “a marvelous solo recital.”
Bernstein moved into his Upper West Side studio in the 1950s and stayed for decades, teaching from the apartment and dividing his later years between Manhattan and a house in South Bristol, Maine. The architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, a former student, once described him as “the most intense, unequivocal teacher imaginable.” Bernstein taught at New York University as well, and his books — including “With Your Own Two Hands,” “20 Lessons in Keyboard Choreography,” and “Monsters and Angels: Surviving a Career in Music” — were translated into German, Japanese, Korean, and Russian.
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His compositions ranged from teaching pieces for beginners to concert works, including the choral piece “Song of Nature,” based on an Emerson essay, and two solo piano books titled “Birds.” Many of his works were inspired by the wildlife around his Maine home; from his coastal property, he posted YouTube videos of himself playing Bach, reading his own poetry, and hand-feeding the squirrels and chipmunks he called “darling critters who are my friends.” One piece was titled “Belinda the Chipmunk.”He was coaxed back into public view by the actor Ethan Hawke, who had confided in Bernstein about his own stage fright and asked to make a documentary. Bernstein told The Guardian he blacked out when the cameras first rolled, but the resulting film, “Seymour: An Introduction,” released in 2014, found a wide and devoted audience and turned a working teacher into something of a cult figure in his late 80s. He continued to play for small audiences and offer master classes well into his 90s.
Bernstein never married. “I have to be by myself in order to sort out all the thoughts that course through my mind,” he said. “Relationships are unpredictable, but art is predictable. When Beethoven puts down a B flat, it’s there forever.”
He is survived by a sister, Evelyn Zorn.
In a 2018 interview with “Living the Classical Life,” Bernstein offered advice on aging that doubled as a kind of personal credo. “For me, life is beginning at 90,” he said. “I’m just learning to play the piano properly.”
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