Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story

Nigel Simeone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351560375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

One of the Broadway musicals that can genuinely claim to have transformed the genre, West Side Story has been featured in many books on Broadway, but it has yet to be the focus of a scholarly monograph. Nigel Simeone begins by exploring the long process of creating West Side Story, including a discussion of Bernstein's sketches, early drafts of the score and script, as well as cut songs. The core of the book is a commentary on the music itself. West Side Story is one of the very few Broadway musicals for which there is a complete published orchestral score, as well as two different editions of the piano-vocal score. The survival of the original copied orchestral score, and the reminiscences of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, reveal details of the orchestration process, and the extent to which Bernstein was involved in this. Simeone's commentary considers: musical characteristics and compositional techniques used to mirror the drama (for example, the various uses of the tritone), motivic development, the use and reinvention of Broadway and other conventions, the creation of dramatic continuity in the score through the use of motifs and other devices, the unusual degree of dissonance and rhythmic complexity (at least for the time), and the integration of Latin-American dance forms (Mambo, Huapango and so on). Simeone also considers the reception of West Side Story in the contemporary press. The stir the show caused included the response that it was the angular, edgy score that made it a remarkable achievement. Not all reviews were uncritical. Finally, the book looks in detail at the making of the original Broadway cast recording, made in just one day, included on the accompanying downloadable resources.

Chapter 1 Bernstein on Broadway before West Side Story

DOI: 10.4324/9781315091860-1

At the end of January 1945, a feature in the New York Times declared that:

Probably the biggest stir in the musical world during the past year has been caused by the emergence from relative obscurity of a 26-year-old Boston boy named Leonard Bernstein. Others may have made a more lasting and important contribution, but for sheer éclat Mr. Bernstein has carried away all the honors.¹

¹ Schubart 1945.

In September 1943, at the age of 25, Bernstein had been appointed Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, and two months later his last-minute substitution for an ailing Bruno Walter at the Philharmonic became front-page news.² But while this was an auspicious start to his career as a conductor, the origins of Leonard Bernstein’s success as a Broadway composer came, prophetically, from a ballet. On 18 April 1944, the hrst performance of Fancy Free at the Metropolitan Opera marked the earliest collaboration between Bernstein and Jerome Robbins. The press reaction was ecstatic:

² For example: ‘Young aide leads Philharmonic, steps in when Bruno Walter is ill'; New York Times, 15 November 1943.

To come right to the point without any ifs, ands, and buts, Jerome Robbins' Fancy Free, which the Ballet Theatre presented in its world premiére last night at the Metropolitan Opera House, is a smash hit. This [is] young Robbins' first go at choreography, and the only tiling he lias to worry about in that direction is how in the world he is going to make his second one any better. ... The music by Leonard Bernstein utilizes jazz in about the same proportion that Robbins' choreography does. It is not in the least self-conscious about it, but takes it as it conies. It is a fine score, humorous, inventive and musically interesting. Indeed, the whole ballet, performance included, is just exactly ten degrees north of terrific.³

³ Martin 1944.

This rave review from John Martin in the New York Times (19 April 1944) was echoed a few days later in an article by Edward Alden Jewell in the same paper, concerned mainly with the impact of the war on (visual) artists. Jewell concluded his piece with a comment on Fancy Free:

Speaking of art that is truly ‘native' - that grows from the soil and the environment that have nourished and helped form the artists responsible for it - the new ballet, ‘Fancy Free,' which had its Ballet Theatre premiere Tuesday evening at the Metropolitan, is a most hastening document. All of our painters and sculptors should see it: that superbly danced tale of three sailors ashore, choreography by Jerome Robbins, music by Leonard Bernstein, setting by Oliver Smith. It is American art through and through.⁴

⁴ Jewell 1944.

The ‘tale of three sailors’ told in Fancy Free led directly to the first big Broadway success for Robbins and Bernstein, again with sets by Oliver Smith: On the Town opened at the Adelphi Theatre. New York, on 28 December 1944.⁵ Though the score is quite different, the story owes a great deal to the earlier ballet. The task of turning it into a Broadway book and libretto was taken on - at Bernstein’s suggestion - by his friends Betty Comden and Adolph Green. It was their first Broadway show too. but, as Betty Comden put it. ‘Lenny said that we were the ones to do the book. That was a good break!’⁶

⁵ The out-of-town tryout for On the Town opened at the Colonial Theatre, Boston, MA, on 13 December 1944.

⁶ Online interview with Collide n and Green at www.broadway.com.

Bernstein and Green met in 1937, and they became lifelong friends. The 19-yearold Bernstein had taken a summer job as a counsellor (tutor) in music at Camp Onota near Pittsheld, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. Green, then aged 22, had been asked to sing the Pirate King in the camp’s production of The Pirates of Penzance; it was directed by Bernstein, who also played the piano.⁷ Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing was also performed at Onota that same summer. This was a show for which both Bernstein and Green had huge enthusiasm. Bernstein was to discuss it in his 1956 Omnibus broadcast about American musical theatre, and Green had seen the original production in 1932: ‘I remember getting a tremendous thrill out of it -I was knocked out by it. I had a standing room ticket for a buck ten. ... It was hysterically funny and so beautiful.’⁸ The earliest surviving photograph of Bernstein conducting was also taken at the camp that summer, with the Onota Rhythm Band.⁹ Bernstein and Green performed together again at Onota in 1938; as Seymour Wadler recalled in a letter to the New York Times in 1990, it was the turn of The Mikado:

⁷ For more details of their earliest encounter, see Burton 1994, pp. 38-9.

⁸ Online interview with Comden and Green at www.broadway.com.

⁹ An online version of this photograph can be found at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/music/Ibcoll/lbphotos/boxl99/42a026_u.tif.

In the summer of 1938 I was an athletic counselor at Camp Onota in Pittsfield, Mass., and a fellow from Harvard named Lenny (though he preferred to be called Leonard) was the dramatic and music counselor. Lenny impressed us greatly with his piano playing, and I knew that his interpretations of Beethoven sonatas were considerably better than my sister's, who was a fine pianist.

At the end of the summer the camp put on Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, with Lenny as producer, director and piano accompanist. The performance by these youngsters (with the help of an amateur musician named Adolph Green from the Bronx) was positively thrilling. The audience thought Leonard Bernstein was marvelous, without realizing how marvelous he was destined to be.¹⁰

¹⁰ Wadler 1990.

In April 1939, during his senior year at Harvard. Bernstein composed and conducted his first theatre score: incidental music for a production by the Harvard Classical Club of The Birds by Aristophanes. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the score was an eclectic amalgam of Debussy and Stravinsky; Bernstein had just attended a concert of Indian music and incorporated elements of that too. as well as snatches of Verdi. This wasn’t quite as haphazard as it sounds. According to Bernadette A. Meyler in her detailed account of this student work, ‘Just as Aristophanes poked fun at the styles of Homer and Hesiod, Bernstein latched onto musical references that his audience would recognize, employing them as a type of auditory shorthand. ’¹¹ After graduating from Harvard in 1939, Bernstein soon found himself working with Green again in New York: while studying conducting with Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Bernstein was the pianist on a recording made by The Revuers, a group of comic actors who were successful in Greenwich Village nightclubs. They included Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Judy Holliday (then still known as Judy Tuvim), Alvin Hammer and John Frank. Made in March 1940 for Musicraft, The Girl with the Two Left Feet (A Musical Satire) is an amusing burlesque on Hollywood movie stars and directors (it’s a spoof about what was described as an ‘epic’ $86 million intermission feature, produced by 19thCentury Wolf). This was Bernstein’s first recording as an accompanist,¹² and, as Humphrey Burton puts it, ‘Bernstein’s fully-integrated sound track gives the best idea we have of his brilliance as a boogie and honky-tonk pianist.’¹³

¹¹ Meyler 1999. p. 76.

¹² His first ever recording was made two months earlier in January 1940, as a solo pianist: David Diamond's Prelude and Fugue no. 3 in C sharp major, for New Music Recordings. The Musicraft set of The Girl with the Two Left Feet also included ‘Joan Crawford Fan Club' as the sixth side, again with Bernstein at the piano. The whole set has been reissued on CD by Pearl in Leonard Bernstein: Wunderkind (GEMS 0005).

¹³ Burton 1994. p. 71.

On the Town was an instant hit: ‘the freshest and most engaging musical show to come our way since the golden days of Oklahoma! Everything about it is right.’ So wrote Lewis Nichols after the first night, in a review that makes some interesting observ ations about why On the Town was so successful, describing it as ‘a perfect example of what a well-knit fusion of the respectable arts can provide for the theatre ’.¹⁴ The ‘fusion’ Nichols mentions had some highly original features, including several extended dance numbers containing some of Bernstein’s boldest music; the show’s veteran producer George Abbott had ‘teased him about “t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tabel of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Bernstein on Broadway before West Side Story
• 2 Genesis
• 3 The Musical Manuscripts
• 4 The Score
• 5 Reception
• 6 The Original Broadway Cast Recording
• Appendix I: West Side Story Musical Manuscripts in the Leonard Bernstein Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC
• Appendix II: West Side Story as Recorded with the Original Broadway Cast
• Bibliography
• Selective Discography, Videography and Online Items
• CD Track List
• Index