Vandals target Leonard Bernstein’s graveyard

4 September 2012, 17:06 | Updated: 4 September 2012, 17:45

Vandals stormed through the Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn, smashing monuments and beheading a marble angel – but a visitor has honoured the gravestone of the late composer.

After a summer of violence, where vandals damaged graves in the Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, a kindly visitor has left a garland of flowers and an empty bottle of whiskey to honour maestro Leonard Bernstein. The composer and conductor died in 1990 after a lengthy career spanning classical music, jazz, and musical theatre.

The grave of the classical music legend still receives attention from visitors, who leave memorabilia from his best-loved works including West Side Story. This is a far cry from the spate of violence that has erupted in the graveyard, where vandals shattered more than 40 memorials and monuments last week, causing an estimated $100,000 of damage.

Bernstein once said: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”