Jonathan / Sarah

Then.

Now. Plus two.

Jonathan Sheffer talks to Sarah Crichton about drawing inspiration from the genius of Leonard Bernstein while the world-famous conductor and composer was living at Harvard to deliver his Norton Lecture series and his daughter Jamie was an undergraduate at Adams House.

Looking back, Jonathan Sheffer remembers his time at Harvard with Leonard Bernstein as being nothing short of life changing. “It was really like Apollo had come down from the clouds and was mingling with us humans with all his godlike qualities,” he recalled.

From composing music for films and tv to conducting orchestras — including the Boston Pops’ June 2000 performance of Bernstein’s “Overture to Candide” for the 25th reunion of the Class of 1975 — Jonathan’s diverse career in music has spanned the worlds of classical, opera, and dance. Having founded the Eos Orchestra in 1995 as a laboratory of new programming ideas, he’s also had his share of heartbreak over failed musicals. Still, he remains hopeful about his latest “joyous and funny” musical about a secret court at Harvard in the 1920s that expelled gay students who President Lowell deemed to be “degenerates and perverts,” resulting in three suicides.  

For PasstheMic75, he talks to his friend Sarah Crichton about his gratitude for all things Bernstein, about how confusing it was to be gay at Harvard in the 1970s, and about his third act project — becoming a single father of twin girls at 62. “I put a tremendous mountain in front of me,” he said of his modus operandi, “and then figure out how to climb it.”