Didn't know till this week that the last thing he conducted was the Beethoven Seventh at Tanglewood that August — and that a coughing fit took him in the third movement and he just held the beat until it passed. Then in October of 1990 he announced he was done conducting, and five days later he was gone. Same man who sat at a piano explaining sonata form to kids on television, and wrote show tunes without apologising for a bar of it.
On the Town came out of him in a matter of weeks in 1944, and the pit players liked working under him, which is rarer than people think — musicians in a Broadway hole six nights a week know within a bar whether a conductor is listening to them.
Fifty-three of those televised talks between 1958 and 1972, and he wrote every script himself — rewriting into the night before the broadcast, apparently. A man who'd explain a fugue to nine-year-olds and not simplify it once.