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This chapter presents an account of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who, although constrained significantly by the ideological climate of the 1950s, refused to silence himself politically. Beginning in the last years of the decade, he became increasingly vocal in his support for New Left causes, including the antiwar, antinuclear, and civil rights movements. On State Department–funded conducting tours with the New York Philharmonic, he tried to use music, particularly the Americanist tradition, to challenge US foreign policy. In his compositions, he remained true to musical Americanism, striving earnestly in his art music to continue Copland’s prewar approach. He found a fruitful outlet for his political commitments in his works for musical theater, but his art music compositions present a much more complex and fraught picture. Bernstein was attempting to resist and undermine political nationalism, while simultaneously advancing cultural nationalism. But in the binarized climate of Cold War America, this would not prove easy.

West Side Story, a collaboration of four extraordinary individuals Jerome Robbins (choreographer and director), Arthur Laurents (librettist), Leonard Bernstein (composer), and Stephen Sondheim (lyricist)-premiered on Broadway on September 26, 1957, and ran for 734 performances. After a national tour that lasted a year, it returned to Broadway for an additional 249 performances. A bona fide hit but not a megahit like Oklahoma! or My Fair Lady, West Side Story eventually logged in as the twelfth longest-running show of the 1950s. The Bernstein-Sondheim-Laurents-Robbins collaboration contains a dream ballet and a mimed prologue that creates a backdrop for the story to follow. More than perhaps any previous book musical, West Side Story uses dance for many additional purposes, not only in musical numbers where characters would be expected to dance (the “Dance at the Gym” and “America”), but in more stylized choreographic settings for several of the show's crucial dramatic events (“The Rumble” and “Taunting Scene”). The creators of West Side Story also managed to take a canonic and extremely well-loved Shakespeare play and adapt it for 1950s audiences while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original. Most significantly, the adaptation both provides dramatically credible and audible musical equivalents of Shakespeare's literary techniques and captures his central themes.

Harry Partch and Leonard Bernstein are divergent in several dimensions, including their marketability. Yet through a juxtaposition of works by these apparent musical antipodes, it is possible to illumine the pervasiveness of certain basic issues in American music theater and to suggest how both Partch's Revelation in the Courthouse Park and Bernstein's Mass reflect several developments in the social history of the 1960s. This chapter considers three primary topics raised by these two works and concentrates on cultural contextualization rather than on detailed comparison. First, they are concerned with ritual and religious expression—with a critique of established American social and religious rituals and with the creation of a new work of ritualistic or didactic status. Second, this critique and transformation is achieved musically through the use, or perhaps abuse, of American popular music and through radical musical juxtaposition. Finally, Partch and Bernstein employ ritual expression and popular music references for the purposes of parody and social criticism, focusing on the relationship of the individual to society. Created at opposite ends of a turbulent decade, but yoked together by violence, Revelation and Mass arrive at somewhat different conclusions.

This introductory chapter discusses Leonard Bernstein, the former cultural ambassador of the United States and a composer of several popular musicals and ballets, including West Side Story. This chapter reveals a side to Bernstein that has been largely ignored by the public: his political life. It notes that while many of Bernstein's biographers have concluded that the composer remained apolitical for most of his life, there are archival documents that reveal Bernstein as a politically engaged man.

This chapter locates the origins of Leonard Bernstein’s polemical statements and presentations of Rhapsody in Blue in his youthful encounters with the piece by exploring two recently discovered documents: a copy of the solo-piano sheet music for the Rhapsody that he acquired in 1932 and a previously unknown arrangement of the work that he prepared for a group of summer camp musicians in 1937. Not only did Bernstein have a particular vision of how the Rhapsody should operate; he also identified deeply with the piece and Gershwin. His arrangement of the Rhapsody in performance and his essay “A Nice Gershwin Tune” became outlets for profound personal and professional anxieties related to his status as a homosexual American-born conductor and composer as he rose to prominence with the New York Philharmonic during the 1950s.

This chapter represents the most thorough and accurate study to date of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, including its long, torturous history both before and after its 1956 premiere. It pays special attention to how the show’s books and lyrics evolved over the year, including contributions of Latouche, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler, and others, and studies its many productions under the supervision of such directors and adaptors as Hal Prince, Jonathan Miller, and John Caird. It also surveys its critical reception over the years.

This chapter examines the work of Leonard Bernstein. It begins with an extended commentary of his career, followed by details on productions, with data and song information. Bernstein’s first theater experience came when the twenty-one-year-old Harvard music major mounted the 1939 Boston première of The Cradle will Rock (Blitzstein: June 16, 1937), also playing the onstage accompaniment. Marc Blitzstein attended, was duly impressed, and the two began a close friendship. Following graduation, Bernstein entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia—where Blitzstein had studied—to train for a career in symphonic music.

The State Department’s Cultural Presentations program famously sent jazz and classical musicians as well as dancers to the USSR. Although commentators have sometimes characterized U.S. music in the Soviet Union as a form of “infiltration,” musical diplomacy did little to destabilize the Soviet Union. Rather, it allowed the enemy superpowers to engage competitively without military action before an attentive worldwide media audience. Leonard Bernstein, for example, made intentionally provocative statements alongside his conciliatory speeches during and after his 1959 visit. These exchanges allowed the enemy peoples to grow accustomed to the idea that their competing states could coexist peacefully, thereby laying the groundwork for détente.

Debuted by Ballet Theatre in 1944, Fancy Free represented the first major success for its composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins. Inspired by The Fleet’s In, a controversial painting by Paul Cadmus, Fancy Free encoded a queer strain in its plot and musical style. Correspondence in the archives of Bernstein and the composer Aaron Copland documents how gay relationships inflected the work’s overall outlook, intermingling biography with art. This chapter probes Bernstein’s musical language as an aesthetic of parody and montage in which he simulated a rapidly shifting array of styles, then stitched them together much like a cartoon or film score.

This chapter offers a detailed account of the legendary premiere of The Cradle Will Rock, a renegade production of the Federal Theatre Project directed by Orson Welles and John Houseman. The chapter continues with a history of the many recordings and productions that followed, including Leonard Bernstein’s longstanding involvement with the work (and some consideration of the artistic and personal relationship between Bernstein and Blitzstein). This chapter also considers dramatizations of the famous premiere, including the 1999 film, Cradle Will Rock, directed by Tim Robbins.

On the Town fused the creative voices of Fancy Free and The Revuers. This chapter chronicles the genesis of the, emphasizing how its key personnel crossed over freely between concert halls and Broadway, On the Town’s outrageously assertive female characters offered a staged version of screwball comedy, with many links to skits by The Revuers. The women articulate their sexual desires with abandon, and they dominate the men—that is, the sailors—with blistering comic banter. Gender forms an important theme, from the work of Betty Comden as lyricist (together with Adolph Green) to the appointment of a woman—Peggy Clark—as stage manager.

This chapter probes the distinctive compositional voice that Bernstein developed in On the Town, a style that relished high-low fusions while shunning existing cultural hierarchies. Bernstein’s music drew upon swing, the blues, parodies (influenced by the Revuers), cartoons, opera, and operetta. Bernstein wrote flexibly for the pit orchestra, at times fulfilling traditional expectations and at others reconfiguring the instrumentation to simulate a swing orchestra or Latin ensemble. Here, the chapter analyzes the music from the opening scene of Act I, conceptualizing “I Feel Like I’m Not Out of Bed Yet” as a Broadway spiritual. The chapter then explores Bernstein’s style as it emerged in three types of musical numbers: ballads, comedy numbers featuring female characters, and symphonic writing for extended sections of dance.

This chapter examines the fraught dynamics preceding and immediately following the birth of the Jewish state of Israel following the conclusion of World War II, and the participation of Americans such as Leonard Bernstein in the celebration of that birth. These pages also introduce the concept of dual loyalty, or tension that American Jews felt questioning whether to identify first and foremost with the USA or the Jewish state, which was settled, in part, by premising American support for Israel on stopping the pressure for American Jews to immigrate to the newly defined state. The chapter concludes with an account of Bernstein’s symphony tour of an Israeli countryside on continued war-footing. Israel becomes fully an American cause.

Leonard Bernstein’s early career was shaped by the global politics of World War II and its aftermath as well as his interest in the world beyond the United States, his understanding of war, and his dedication to peace. It was also propelled by the United States government’s investment in his background, qualities, and success in its war effort and postwar public relations. The initial encounter of Kazuko Amano (born Ueno) with Bernstein was enabled by the cultural policy of US occupation forces. After her initial fan letter to Bernstein in 1947, she followed his rising career through recordings, broadcasts, and performances and became Japan’s most loyal fan of the maestro, who quickly became an American icon with his appointment as the music director of the New York Philharmonic and the huge success of West Side Story.

This chapter details Gershwin's early contacts with African American music and musicians. His Blue Monday Blues of 1922, a failed attempt at writing an operatic scene about Negro characters, is sung by whites in blackface. The chapter also discusses his thoughts on Jewish artists and African American music. Fifteen years later, Gershwin's masterpiece, a folk opera, Porgy and Bess, comes to Broadway and receives mixed reviews. The orchestration question is resolved at the end of the chapter.

Though Harris was Schuman's last major teacher, it was Aaron Copland who gave Schuman the biggest boost in his career, first by helping Schuman win the prize for the Second Symphony and then by encouraging Schuman to present the work to Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky agreed to perform the symphony, and Schuman's host that weekend was a junior at Harvard, Leonard Bernstein. This chapter explores the early beginnings of these new and seminal relationships, with an emphasis on the close friendship Schuman developed with Copland. This chapter also looks at an aborted ballet Schuman was commissioned to write and considers the possibility that some of this music became part of the American Festival Overture.

The late 1940s brought Schuman back in touch with his Jewish roots through various encounters and queries that occurred. Leonard Bernstein, in particular, was in a state of wonderment at the birth of Israel, and he tried to interest his good friend Schuman in it. Notwithstanding these various reminders of his own background and heritage, Schuman reaffirmed his coolness to organized religion. He expressed himself through his music, and the Sixth Symphony (1948) is a major testament to Schuman's ideas and ideals. During this period of time, Koussevitzky died, and with him Schuman lost a champion of his music. He gained, however, another champion in the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy. This chapter includes a cameo by English writer Stephen Spender and a look at a withdrawn work that would become the nucleus of the Seventh Symphony (1960).