Juilliard's Top Lawyer Teaches Art and Justice at Tanglewood

Friday, July 3, 10:30am | Lenox, MA | Tickets required

Lesley Rosenthal brings her course "Arts and the Rule of Law" to the Volpe Studio at the Linde Center for Music and Learning on July 3, part of the Tanglewood Learning Institute's summer program. The session, which can be purchased individually or as part of a series, starts from John Adams's formulation of American justice—"a government of laws, not of men"—and asks what it actually feels like to live in a society that honors that principle, or breaches it. Rosenthal draws on works ranging from Beethoven's "Eroica" to Picasso's "Guernica" to trace how artists have given form to the moral force of justice and to its violation.

Rosenthal has built a career at the intersection of law and the arts. She is Chief Operating Officer and Corporate Secretary of The Juilliard School, a position she's held since 2018, and before that spent 13 years as General Counsel of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where she helped lay the legal groundwork for the institution's $1.2 billion campus redevelopment. A Harvard College and Harvard Law graduate who later chaired the Arts & Humanities committee of Harvard's Board of Overseers, she's also the bestselling author of Good Counsel: Meeting the Legal Needs of Nonprofits and, as past president of the New York Bar Foundation, led that organization through a three-year strategic plan centered on the rule of law.

The course debuted at Juilliard in 2025, evolving out of earlier seminars she taught at Harvard Law School, Georgetown, and the University of Miami.

What gives her credibility on the artistic side of the argument, rather than just the legal one, is that she's a working musician as well—a violinist and violist who co-founded the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony and co-wrote the libretto for the jazz opera "Dear Erich" with her husband, jazz pianist Ted Rosenthal.

That opera is based on letters between Ted's Chicago-born father and family members trapped in Germany during the Holocaust, and has been performed at venues including the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington.

The Rosenthals split time between Manhattan and a second home in Otis, and Ted's trio performs regularly in the region. Rosenthal has argued that music succeeds in conveying ideas like justice and freedom in places legal texts can't reach.

Volpe Studio, Linde Center for Music and Learning, Tanglewood, 297 West St., Lenox, MA. Tickets at bso.org.