When Joy Changed Its Name

On Christmas Day, 1989, less than seven weeks after the Berlin Wall crumbled, Leonard Bernstein stood before an orchestra unlike any the world had seen. Musicians from East Germany, West Germany, New York, London, Paris, and Leningrad sat side by side in the Schauspielhaus near the Brandenburg Gate. They had come to perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony — but Bernstein made one audacious change.…