Leonard Bernstein
Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story”
Leonard Bernstein was the first American composer to achieve not only fame, but a measure of superstardom generally accorded only to pop or rock stars and movie icons. As a conductor, he was known for a dramatic, flamboyant manner that scandalized his detractors, and he championed composers like Mahler who were seen as ‘too difficult’ for the public to comprehend. As an educator, he brought classical music to a whole new generation through his televised Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, beginning in 1958. As a composer, he made his mark in the concert and ballet halls (1944 saw the premieres of both his Symphony No. 1, “Jeremiah,” and the ballet Fancy Free), in movies (1954’s On the Waterfront), and on stage. His West Side Story (1957) is one of the landmark achievements of American musical theater.
West Side Story, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that plays out in the New York slums, was called a “social music drama” by its creators, composer Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and choreographer Jerome Robbins. The musical added a whole new layer of meaning to the Bard’s tale of tragic lovers with its portrayal of the rival gangs the Jets (streetwise white New York teens) and the Sharks (tough Puerto Rican immigrants).
Although social themes have always been a part of theater, West Side Story brought the idea of social consciousness to the American musical, leading the way for later works such as Les Miserables and Rent.
The play premiered in Washington DC in August, 1957, and was followed by a production in New York that ran for two years, and a national tour. A motion picture version was released in 1961, and in 1960, while advising the arrangers for the film score, Bernstein created the orchestral suite of dances. The New York Philharmonic premiered the dances at a fund-raiser for the orchestra’s pension fund, a “Valentine for Leonard Bernstein” gala concert, on February 13, 1961, under the baton of Lukas Foss.
The dances–and the score of the musical–revolve around a tritone figure of C–F-sharp–G, the well-known opening of the song “Maria.” As Bernstein later wrote: “The three notes pervade the whole piece, inverted, done backwards. I didn’t do all this on purpose. It seemed to come out in ‘Cool’ and as the gang whistle [in the Prologue]. The same three notes.” Melodic and rhythmic influences include everything from jazz syncopations to Latin-American dance, treated with classical techniques such as fugue. Like all of Bernstein’s works the music is rhythmically challenging, yet it is also eminently danceable; as ballet dancer Lady Diana Menuhin once said of Bernstein, “I know no contemporary composer who so well writes for movement, understands so well the movement of the body.”
The suite opens with the Prologue, the famous opening confrontation of the Jets and the Sharks. The haunting strains of “Somewhere,” the play’s anthem to the dream of a better life, contrast with the lively Latin dances of the “Mambo” and “Cha-cha.” The “Cool” fugue features a 12-tone scale, and segues into the final, deadly fight between the gangs in “Rumble.” A solo flute plays “I Had a Love” to close the suite, which ends, like the musical, on a haunting, unresolved tritone chord.