Ailing Bernstein to Miss Spoleto Festival

Leonard Bernstein canceled his appearance at Friday’s opening gala at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. because the composer is recovering from pneumonia, festival organizers announced Tuesday.

“We’re all shocked. We only heard about it yesterday. He is a very sick man, and he absolutely can’t come,” said Gian Carlo Menotti, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who founded the American festival in 1977.

Bernstein, 71, was to have conducted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in a concert opening the 14th festival and celebrating Charleston’s recovery from the ravages of Hurricane Hugo. The event has been sold out for weeks.

“People who love music will come anyway,” Menotti said. “People who want to look at some rare star will probably want their money back.”

During the festival’s second year, in 1978, the composer of “West Side Story” was scheduled to conduct three concerts. He withdrew because his wife, Felicia, was critically ill with cancer. She died in June of that year.

“This time it is the doctor’s orders pure and simple,” Bernstein wrote in a letter to Menotti, even offering to provide a written doctor’s excuse.

“I am in the process of recovering from a brush with pneumonia and a complete week’s rest has been imposed upon me,” the conductor said in a statement.