On November 14, 1943, a 25-year-old assistant conductor was told that Bruno Walter had the flu and that he would lead the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall with no rehearsal, on live national radio, in music by Strauss and Wagner. This episode traces how Leonard Bernstein, born Louis Bernstein in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Russian Jewish immigrants, went from a father who refused to pay for piano lessons to the front page of the New York Times.

The hosts cover the synagogue cantor who first moved him, the aunt's upright piano that landed in the house, the neighborhood lessons he taught for pennies, his Harvard thesis on jazz, blues, and spirituals in American music, and the birthday party where he played Aaron Copland's piano variations for Copland himself. They follow his double life as music director of the New York Philharmonic and ...