Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1918, and died in New York on October 14, 1990. While the idea for the work that was to become West Side Story originated with Jerome Robbins in 1947, the story and work as we know it was created primarily in 1956-57 by composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer/director Robbins, playwright Arthur Laurents, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Hal Prince was the producer. The production opened in previews in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia before arriving on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre on September 26, 1957, for an original run of 732 performances. In 1960 Bernstein prepared his Symphonic Suite from West Side Story with the assistance of his orchestrators Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal. Lukas Foss led the first performance with the New York Philharmonic in a pension fund concert of February 13, 1961.
The score of the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes and English horn, E-flat clarinet, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets (1st doubling trumpet in D), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (4 players: bongos, tambourine, timbales, tom-tom, 2 snare drums, conga drum, tenor drum, bass drum, 4 pitched drums (an interval of a third apart), traps (cymbals, snare drum, tom-toms, bass drum), triangle, suspended cymbal, cymbals (pair), finger cymbals, 3 cowbells, tam-tam, vibraphone, glockenspiel, chime, woodblock, guiro, maracas, xylophone, and police whistle), harp, piano, celesta, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Conductor, pianist, composer, educator, and all-around musical personality, Bernstein was the epitome of the versatile musician. As a composer he embraced styles from the vernacular to the learned in a mix that never failed to communicate directly with audiences. One of our greatest Broadway composers, he also wrote three major, serious-minded symphonies and had an abiding love for the musical lineages of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, whose influences emerged constantly in his own music.
Although Leonard Bernstein’s parents lived in Boston at the time of his birth, he was born on August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the mill town where his mother’s family lived. He was legally named Louis, but his family called him Lenny or Leonard from the beginning, and as a teenager he had his name officially changed to Leonard. Both his parents were Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who arrived through Ellis Island, his mother Jennie at age 7 and his father Samuel, who settled in New York City, at 16. Samuel made his way to Boston in the 1910s for work and by the 1920s had established his own thriving business. The family moved frequently, living in a number of Boston neighborhoods—Mattapan, Allston, and several Roxbury addresses—as well as Revere and ultimately Newton. While in Boston the family attended temple at Mishkan Tefila, then located in an impressively stately building on Seaver Street across from Franklin Park. In the 1930s, the family acquired a lakeside summer cottage in Sharon. (Their relative affluence in the time of the Depression was testament to the success of Samuel’s beauty products business.)
The oldest of three children, Leonard Bernstein attended elementary school at the Garrison School near Franklin Park, was accepted to the merit-based Boston Latin School (about a mile from Symphony Hall on Avenue Louis Pasteur), and attended Harvard University in Cambridge. He loved music from childhood and benefited when his father’s sister moved to New York City, leaving her piano with the family when Leonard was 10. His father was willing for him to have piano lessons but balked at encouraging a music career once things turned serious. Part of Bernstein’s practical education came from earning money for his own lessons by teaching younger kids and playing jazz and popular music at weddings. In Sharon his ambitions extended to producing and performing versions of Carmen, The Mikado, and H.M.S. Pinafore for fun. It was by these paths he developed the multifaceted practical skills and stylistic breadth that would later define his career. He first attended concerts at Symphony Hall in the early 1930s; among the earliest of these were a Boston Pops concert led by Arthur Fiedler and a solo recital by Rachmaninoff. By 1933 he had a subscription to the BSO season.
In spite of his father’s objections, at Harvard Bernstein majored in music, studying piano with Heinrich Gebhard and working with the composers Walter Piston and Edward Burlingame Hill. He graduated in 1939 and was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he remained for two more years. It was during his Harvard years, in 1937, that he first met Aaron Copland, whose thorny Piano Variations had become a staple of Bernstein’s performing repertoire. Copland at age 37 was among America’s leading concert composers, and his friendship and advice had a stupendous impact on Bernstein’s career. It was in part through his encouragement that the younger composer, whose ambitions had lately begun to include conducting, joined the first class of the Berkshire Music Center (now the Tanglewood Music Center) in 1940, where he would study conducting with the school’s founder, BSO conductor Serge Koussevitzky, as well as composition with Copland himself. His first performance conducting a professional orchestra came on July 11, 1941, when, as a winner of a Boston Herald musical quiz, and without rehearsal, he led the Boston Pops Orchestra on the Esplanade in Wagner’s Meistersinger Overture. The prize was originally to have been a week-long residency at Tanglewood, but since Bernstein was already a student of Koussevitzky, the conducting opportunity was awarded as an extra.
In the following decade, Koussevitzky, as he had done for Copland earlier, provided Bernstein with a variety of opportunities to exhibit his many talents. Koussevitzky and the BSO gave performances of the composer’s Symphony No. 1, Jeremiah (a product of his early 20s), and commissioned and premiered his Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, with the composer as piano soloist. Bernstein was also called upon to lead the American premiere performances of Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes with the Berkshire Music Center in 1946 and the world premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie with the BSO in 1949. Although Bernstein’s Broadway and conducting activities shifted his geographical center to New York City, he remained closely tied to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and especially to Tanglewood for the rest of his life. His Symphony No. 3, Kaddish, was a BSO 75th-anniversary commission. Fifty years after his first summer at Tanglewood, he led his final concert there on August 19, 1990, conducting the BSO. On August 14 he had conducted the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, which he was scheduled to take on a European tour that fall, but he fell ill, canceling the tour, and died that October 14 in New York.
West Side Story is, by any measure, Bernstein’s biggest hit—not least because of the 1961 film made from the Broadway musical. Although he wrote another Broadway musical—the unsuccessful 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with Alan Jay Lerner in 1976—West Side Story really marked the culmination of Bernstein’s involvement with musicals that began only a little over ten years earlier. Iin 1944 he collaborated with choreographer Jerome Robbins on the ballet Fancy Free, which grew into the musical On the Town, vehicle for such hits as “New York, New York” and “Lonely Town” and was made into a Hollywood musical in 1949 starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. He followed up with his 1951 musical Peter Pan, for which he also wrote the lyrics, and 1953’s Wonderful Town, all in parallel with the activity mentioned above, including composing his first two symphonies and his conducting work the BSO, the New York Philharmonic, and elsewhere. In 1954 he wrote his own film score, for On the Waterfront.
The idea of an urban musical based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and originally to have featured an Irish Catholic boy and a Jewish girl, was initially proposed to Bernstein in 1947 by Jerome Robbins. Arthur Laurents wrote a draft of this “East Side Story,” but other projects intervened. When the principals revisited the idea a few years later, the scene was transformed to a new neighborhood and revolved around the feuding White (corresponding to Montague) Jets and Puerto Rican (Capulet) Sharks—and a love story between Tony, a former Jet, and the Puerto Rican Maria, sister of Bernardo. Arthur Laurents wrote the play, Stephen Sondheim the lyrics; Bernstein composed the music, and Jerome Robbins created the choreography. Bernstein worked on the score concurrently with the musical Candide, based on Voltaire’s novel (which has some wonderful things in it but has not been nearly so successful). West Side Story premiered in 1957 and ran for more than 700 performances on Broadway, winning six Tony Awards. The film musical was co-directed by Jerome Robbins, who was replaced mid-production by Robert Wise (of Sound of Music fame). Starring Natalie Wood and Rita Morena, it was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won ten.
In 1960 Bernstein reworked nine of the score’s numbers into a symphonic fantasia, Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, first performed on February 13, 1961, by the New York Philharmonic with the composer’s friend (and 1940 Tanglewood classmate) Lukas Foss conducting. At just over twenty minutes, the suite covers most of the familiar music of the show. Bernstein reordered the material to achieve a satisfying musical narrative for concert performance, but also made the songs more clearly symphonic with the assistance of orchestrators Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who had also orchestrated the Broadway show. One effect of compressing the entire score into a concert piece is that of highlighting its musical cohesiveness, for example the prevalence of the tritone melodic figure in “Maria” (here, mainly in the “Cha-Cha” section) and the otherwise very different “Cool,” as well as in the Latin-adjacent percussion throughout the score. The tense, high-energy Introduction, Mambo, “Cool” Fugue and “Rumble” contrast with the more lyrical, song-based sections. The second section is based on “Somewhere,” a place of imagined peace and tranquility; the Scherzo that follows takes us out of the urban setting. The fifth dance, “Cha-Cha,” is an elegant, charming reminder of the song “Maria.” The finale is a beautiful elegy.
Robert Kirzinger
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
The first complete Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story were led by Seiji Ozawa in the Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade on July 3, 1976, and the following day in the Shed at Tanglewood. Leonard Bernstein and John Williams led complete performances at Tanglewood. Andris Nelsons led the first complete performance at Symphony Hall for Opening Night of the 2017-18 season.