A man of phenomenal and wide-ranging musical gifts, Leonard Bernstein is one of the great figures of twentieth-century American music. Following his time at Harvard University he entered the celebrated Curtis Institute in 1941 where a friend said, (apropos his outstanding talent), ‘Lenny is doomed to success’. It was a true prophecy in that Bernstein’s many-faceted career has inevitably restricted the number of works he has composed and it was, therefore, most fortunate that the Very Reverend Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester, chose such a propitious time to approach the composer to write a work for the 1965 Chichester Festival. Bernstein had decided to take a sabbatical year, free from busy conducting schedules, to meditate on the current state of music and his own attitude towards it. This freedom also allowed him to take up whatever creative venture appealed to him and Bernstein summed up his feelings at this time in an article which appeared in the New York Times of 24 October, 1965.