Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

by Block, Geoffrey

  By the third draft (March 15, 1956), which also concludes at the bridal shop, Maria “tries to tear the wedding veil with her hands, cannot, picks up sewing shears and is about to cut the veil when a new thought [presumably suicide] enters her mind.”55 In this draft, as in the five others over the next sixteen months, a mortally wounded Tony finds Maria, and the lovers are able to share a few final moments together.

  Robbins credits Rodgers for realizing how to “solve a problem like Maria” (two years before The Sound of Music’s Maria Von Trapp) and for keeping Maria alive: “I remember Richard Rodgers’s contribution. We had a death scene for Maria—she was going to commit suicide or something, as in Shakespeare. He said, ‘She’s dead already, after this all happens to her.’”56 All sources agree that Bernstein’s collaborators wanted to convert Laurents’s prose speech into music for Maria, just as Bernstein and Sondheim had raided the libretto for “Something’s Coming” and “A Boy Like That.” In the 1985 panel discussion Bernstein recalled that he discarded four or five attempts to create an aria for Maria from Laurents’s dummy lyric that would become Maria’s speech: “It’s not that I didn’t try.” In an interview with Humphrey Burton, Bernstein offered a more detailed account:

  “It cries out for music,” Bernstein said himself. “I tried to set it very bitterly, understated, swift. I tried giving all the material to the orchestra and having her sing an obbligato throughout. I tried a version that sounds just like a Puccini aria, which we really did not need. I never got past six bars with it. I never had an experience like that. Everything sounded wrong.” So Maria’s words, which Laurents had written merely as a guide to lyricist and composer, became the dramatic text. “I made,” Bernstein confessed, “a difficult, painful but surgically clean decision not to set it at all.”57

  Despite these liberties, for the most part the collaborators of West Side Story preserve the spirit of the original as well as what is perhaps Shakespeare’s central theme: the triumph of youthful passionate love over youthful passionate hate, even in death. They also incorporate Shakespeare’s literary device of foreshadowing, for similar dramatic and musical purposes, to inform audiences of the inevitable, albeit mostly self-made, destiny facing the young lovers. Tony’s somewhat more optimistic premonition in “Something’s Coming” early in the musical can be seen, for example, as a parallel to Mercutio’s famous Queen Mab speech: “My mind misgives / Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night’s revels and expire the term / Of a despised life, closed in my breast, / By some vile forfeit of untimely death” (act 1, scene 4, lines 112–17).

  Romeo’s bittersweet, sorrowful premonitions in the first eleven lines of act V (“I dreamt my lady came and found me dead”) clearly correspond to the Romantic message most clearly expressed in “Somewhere,” introduced by an anonymous offstage “Girl” (opera stars Reri Grist on Broadway and Marilyn Horne on Bernstein’s 1985 recording, handpicked by the composer) during the dream ballet sequence in act II.58 By the end of Bernstein’s musical counterpart to Shakespeare in the dream sequence, audiences know that the place and time for Tony and Maria will not be a flat on the Upper West Side. Rather, as in the tale of Tristan and Isolde, their passionate love will be fulfilled only after death. With great ingenuity Bernstein manages to discover a convincing musical equivalent to Shakespeare’s foreshadowing of death, a musical transformation from youthful hate to youthful love.

  A “Tragic Story in Musical-Comedy Terms”

  As early as 1949, Bernstein, Laurents, and Robbins were consciously striving to write “a musical that tells a tragic story in musical-comedy terms” and to avoid “falling into the ‘operatic trap.’” At the same time they—mainly Bernstein as the composer—borrowed freely from the European operatic and symphonic traditions.59 The degree to which Broadway musicals could and should aspire to the condition of nineteenth-century tragic opera remains a controversial issue often vigorously and irreconcilably divided along party lines. Representing one side is Joseph P. Swain, who views Broadway generally as a series of “missed chances and unanswered challenges” that “made tragic drama in the American musical theater into an Olympus, beckoning beyond reach.”60 Not surprisingly for Swain, “Maria’s last speech should indeed have been her biggest aria.”61 Similarly, in the West Side Story entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera Jon Alan Conrad considers Bernstein’s “failure to find music for Maria’s final scene” one of the work’s “weak points.”62 Those who interpret the dramaturgy of musicals as a workable alternative, perhaps even a corrective, to opera might conclude with Stephen Banfield that “whatever fears Laurents may have had that it would turn into a ‘goddamned Bernstein opera,’ one of West Side Story’s greatest strengths is that it did not.”63 Accordingly, “Maria’s final speech works perfectly well as dialogue.”64

  The analytical remarks that follow will show that Bernstein borrowed from his European predecessors as well as from his American present. The varied score consists of three primary styles: a variant of cool jazz for the Jets; a cornucopia of Latin American dances associated with the Sharks, their girl friends, and Maria; and music that suggests European and American operatic traditions for much of the love music. The jazz can be heard most readily in the Prologue, “Jet Song,” the Blues and Jump music in “The Dance at the Gym,” “Cool,” and The Rumble. Latin music is featured in the Promenade (paso doble), Mambo, and Cha-Cha dances in “The Dance at the Gym,” the tango in “Maria,” the seis and huapango in “America,” and the cachucha in “I Feel Pretty.” Of these song and dance prototypes only the seis can claim any authentic ties with Puerto Rico, which for some makes West Side Story about as Puerto Rican as Georges Bizet’s Carmen is Spanish (or Cuban). Operatic dialects are most recognizable in “Tonight,” “Somewhere,” and the double duet “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love.”

  Combining techniques and ideologies of nineteenth-century opera and American and Latin vernacular styles, Bernstein forged his own dramatic musical hybrid. While the connections to Latin dance rhythms and cool jazz are immediately apparent and even labeled, the European technical procedures require more explanation. Although motivic melodic analysis no longer serves as the central analytical paradigm, the crucial role motivic development plays in some musicals, most notably Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, and West Side Story, is persuasive. More important, the principal motivic transformations are readily perceived (even to inexperienced listeners) and the more intricate melodic connections usually serve a demonstrable dramatic purpose.

  Since the most famous exponent of nineteenth-century tragic drama was Wagner (his views were popular especially in the 1950s), it is not surprising that Bernstein, in setting the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, borrowed melodic and harmonic elements most commonly associated with Wagner’s operas (although certainly not limited to these works). The principal melodic technique is the pervasive use of leitmotivs (short themes that represent people, things, or abstract ideas) as source material for thematic transformation and organic unity.65 Harmonically, Bernstein used the deceptive cadence, a sequence of chords in which a dominant fails to resolve to its tonic.66 Also associated with Wagner and adopted by Bernstein is the technique of having the orchestra present an underlying dramatic commentary on the melodic line. Finally, the ensuing analytical discussion will suggest that Bernstein borrowed a central and specific leitmotiv from Wagner and used it for a related dramatic purpose.67

  Bernstein’s Wagnerian vision is most profoundly revealed in his use of the song “Somewhere,” a song that, despite its early conception, did not achieve its vocal independence until a relatively late stage in the compositional process. As previously noted, until the production began its rehearsals in June, the piano-vocal score manuscript reveals that this song, eventually intoned by a woman offstage, was to be entirely danced. Only after the “Procession and Nightmare” did Tony and Maria return to sing the final eight measures of “Somewhere.”68

  Nearly all
of the musical material in the thirty-seven-measure “Somewhere” is based on one of three brief motives: (a), (b), and three versions of (c). See Example 13.4, which shows A and B of the overall form, A (8), A’ (8), B (8), A” (8), and B” (5). Despite their brevity, each motive contains a distinctive rhythmic or melodic profile. More important, each motive will be purposefully foreshadowed. The first motive (a) which opens the song on “There’s a place”—possibly derived from the second movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto or, more likely, from the final measures of Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture on Romeo and Juliet—consists of three notes: a rising minor seventh (B up to A) followed by a descending half-step (A down to G). Bernstein uses this motive in the vocal part to mark the principal statements of the tune on the words “There’s a place” (mm. 1—2 and A’, mm. 25—26) and “There’s a time” (A’, mm. 9—10) that initiate each A section.

  Example 13.4. “Somewhere” motives

  (a) “There’s a place for us” (motives a and b)

  (b) “Some day! Somewhere” (motive c)

  Bernstein elides the last note of this a motive with a second motive, b, on “place for us,” composed of intervals that form a simple descending minor or, less frequently, major triad. This second motive with its idiosyncratic rhythmic signature is usually paired with its predecessor and occurs nine times in the first sixteen measures of the song and another four thereafter. The most frequently stated (six times) descending minor triad, C-sharp minor (G-E-C or vi in E major as in m. 2) marks a deceptive and therefore ambiguous resolution. For most of the song Bernstein plays on our expectation that the B major dominant seventh implied in the first motive, which corresponds to the “place” for Tony and Maria, should be followed by the tonic chord, E major. Like many nineteenth-century composers, however, Bernstein does not allow his song to actually arrive on the tonic E until the final measures. It is tempting to make a connection between these deceptive cadences and Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, where harmonic resolutions are similarly denied to make the dramatic point that nowhere on earth will there be a place to rest for Wagner’s star-crossed lovers.

  The minor seventh melodic interval of the first motive (“There’s a place”) and the dotted rhythm signature of the triadic second motive (“place for us”) also permeates the orchestral underpinning of “Somewhere.”69 After the offstage “Girl” introduces the first motive vocally, the orchestra will repeat it until interrupted by the first appearance of the third (or “Somewhere”) motive (c1) at measure 8. The “place for us” motive gains in orchestral as well as vocal prominence after measure 8 as it frequently answers its vocal statements, occasionally straddling measures in the process.70

  After its solitary appearance during the course of the first two A sections, the third “Somewhere” motive will emerge in the second half of the song as the principal rhythmic motive (with no less than eight statements). Bernstein introduces this third motive with a descending half-step (E to D); thereafter the most emphasized melodic interval will be an ascending whole-step (c2) to mark the modulation to C major on the words “Some day! Somewhere” (mm. 17 and 18). On three other occasions, “living,” “–giving,” and “Somewhere” (mm. 20, 22, and 23, respectively) he changes the third motive more drastically with a descending perfect fifth (c3). All three melodic versions of this third “Somewhere” motive share the same defining rhythmic identity.

  At the outset of Romeo and Juliet the character known as the Chorus informs Shakespeare’s audience of the destiny soon to befall the doomed lovers.71 The characters themselves, of course, are not allowed to know this. Similarly, Romeo’s dreams prepare audiences for the forthcoming tragedy, but Romeo himself does not fully grasp their significance until after the fact.

  Bernstein borrows the theatrical device of foreshadowing when he successively anticipates the three “Somewhere” motives in “Tonight,” Tony and Maria’s impassioned love duet on the fire escape (Shakespeare’s Veronese balcony) within minutes of their first meeting at the gym dance.72 As in Wagner’s music dramas, the orchestra gives an alert audience classified information to which the principals are not privy. At the end of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, for example, the first opera in the Ring tetralogy, when the gods enter the newly constructed fortress Valhalla as the trumpet plays a new motive that will be identified one opera later in the cycle, Die Walküre, when Sieglinde tells Siegmund about the sword. At the conclusion of “Tonight” the idealistic lovers show their oneness by singing in unison and the celestial heights of youthful optimistic love by singing and holding high A’s. Meanwhile, back on earth, the omniscient orchestra warns audiences of their imminent doom (Example 13.5). Upon future hearings, audiences come to realize that the death associated with “Somewhere” is already present at the moment of greatest bliss in “Tonight.” As with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, another Romeo and Juliet prototype, love and death, like love and hate, are inextricably entwined.

  Example 13.5. Orchestral foreshadowing of “Somewhere” at the conclusion of the Balcony Scene (“Tonight”)

  A second prominent foreshadowing of “Somewhere” occurs minutes later during the dance between choruses of “Cool,” when the Jets make an energetic but ultimately fruitless attempt to achieve a calm before the rumble. Here Bernstein uses the first “Somewhere” motive (without its usual second-motive continuation) as the first three notes of the fugue subject that introduces the “Cool” fugue, danced rather than sung by the Jets (Example 13.6a). Several measures later a slightly transformed version of the third “Somewhere” motive (Example 13.6b, c3 and c1) can also be heard.73 Like the use of the three “Somewhere” motives presented in succession at the conclusion of the “Tonight” duet, the idea here is an orchestral one that can be interpreted as a foreshadowing of death, much in the way the orchestra at the conclusion of Wagner’s Das Rheingold informs the audience, but not Wotan, of Siegfried’s sword.74

  Example 13.6. “Somewhere” motives in “Cool” fugue

  (a) first “Somewhere” motive (motive a)

  (b) third “Somewhere” motive (motive c)

  Ingeniously, Bernstein finds a new use for the “There’s a place” motive when Maria and Anita reconcile their anger and pain in “I have a love,” the song that follows the “Somewhere” dream ballet. In this climactic scene the composer transforms the first “Somewhere” motive into a new context. As shown in Example 13.7, Bernstein preserves the melody but alters the rhythm to fit a new declamation on the words, “I love him, I’m his” and “I love him, we’re one” sung by Maria to Anita, and in harmony with her friend on the words, “When love comes so strong.”75

  The “Procession and Nightmare” introduces a new important motive shown in Example 13.8a, a motive that will return to conclude the musical in the Finale. In contrast to the three “Somewhere” motives, the “Procession” motive is not foreshadowed in earlier portions of the work. Rather, this “Procession” motive itself foreshadows a new principal theme, set to “I have a love, and it’s all that I have” and “I have a love and it’s all that I need” (the opening is shown in Example 13.8b), where it alternates with a rhythmic transformation of the first “Somewhere” motive (compare Examples 13.4a and 13.7).76 The “I have a love” motive also retains its symbiotic relationship with the three “Somewhere” motives, since it will either adjoin or occur simultaneously with one or more of these “Somewhere” motives whenever it is heard. The “Procession” motive also bears an uncanny and perhaps intended melodic, rhythmic, and symbolic connection with Wagner’s “redemption” theme (Example 13.8c) first sung by Sieglinde in Die Walküre and later by Brünnhilde during the Immolation Scene that concludes Die Götterdämmerung.77

  Example 13.7. “Somewhere” motive in “I Have a Love”

  “Somewhere” and “Procession and Nightmare,” with their foreshadowings and symbolic apotheoses, musically convey the principal dramatic message of West Side Story. But Bernstein also uses musical materials more direc
tly by taking advantage of music’s power to depict psychological states and by assigning appropriate musical equivalents to the driving emotions of passionate youthful hate and its counterpart in youthful love. Bernstein’s principal musical accomplice to make this possible is the tritone or augmented fourth, a highly charged dissonant interval that figures prominently in the motive associated with the hate-filled gangs (Example 13.9a, F-B). It may not be coincidental that the pervasive use of the intervals formed by these notes C-F-B (a rising fourth followed by a rising tritone) as a central motive in West Side Story) employs the same three-note sequence of notes heard as the opening and central motive of Alban Berg’s youthful late-Romantic early-modernist Piano Sonata, op. 1 (1907–1908), well known in Bernstein’s circle (Example 13.9b, G-C-F). With its short upbeat, its disproportionately long second note, and the short final note on the tritone, to mark the second note of the tritone, the hate motive relates even more closely rhythmically as well in approximate pitch to the principal motive sounded by the Shofar (the latter not always easily determined on this instrument), the ancient ram’s horn that announces Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a sound that Bernstein knew well.