Intro to Bernstein on Broadway

WRITINGS OF JOHN MAUCERI JOHNMAUCERI.COM

Introduction to BERNSTEIN ON BROADWAY

First of all, he wasn’t actually a New Yorker – mind. They certainly made history, but that was but could he have loved it more? Could any the farthest thing from their minds. composer be more associated with this city and its culture? Yet, just as Beethoven wasn’t What still astounds me, looking through this Viennese and Offenbach wasn’t a Parisian (or anthology, is its consistency: not just of quality even French, for that matter), Leonard Bernstein but also of style. It all sounds like Leonard remains the quintessential New Yorker. Bernstein. He somehow found his musical voice early on and kept to it: refining and adapting to He lived and wrote there. He was Music his material, but always sounding like Leonard Director and then Laureate Conductor of the New Bernstein. (I am reminded of the answer his York Philharmonic. He made television shows father Sam gave, when asked why he didn’t there. His one original film score (On the support his son’s early forays into music. His Waterfront) is a musical description of the great answer, “How was I to know he would turn out to city. And then there are his Broadway shows. be Leonard Bernstein?” is part of theater lore, but is also to the point.) He became Leonard Not only was he inspired by life in New York, Bernstein in On the Town and he remained he actually captured what it feels like to live there Leonard Bernstein to the end. in his music. Of all the things one can say about West Side Story it is worth taking a moment to I first met him in the summer of 1971. His consider how it is the fixed artistic image of New normal two weeks at Tanglewood had been York in the 1950s. It was not written to invoke a reduced to only one, because of his work on passed time and place. It was composed and Mass, which was scheduled to open the Kennedy produced simultaneously with the events Center the next month. Although I, like millions portrayed on the stage. (Remember, that was the of others, “knew” Leonard Bernstein from time of The Music Man, and My Fair Lady, both television, I really had no idea of the importance of which took place in 1912.) of meeting him and working with him. He had come to conduct Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Just as George Gershwin invented a way to which, in typical Lenny style, he referred to as capture in music, the New York of the 1920s and “this other guy’s Mass.” 1930s, Leonard Bernstein achieved that same unintended goal with the New York of the 1940s We conducting fellows were required to sing and 1950s. I say unintended, because Lenny in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and I still merely wrote music. Merely is of course an ironic remember that first rehearsal and the intense, word here. He frequently said the he and his passionate work in which we all willingly spectacular collaborators we writing shows and participated. When it was over, I found myself no one associated with the unqualified walking under the stars outside married student masterpiece West Side Story had anything else in housing, and crying. Quite simply put: Leonard

Bernstein reminded me why I was a musician. I have never forgotten that moment and hope I In 1973, when I was helping Hal Prince and never will. Stephen Sondheim adapt Candide to an entirely new book by Hugh Wheeler, I suggested that it Lenny and I worked together for eighteen years, might fun to put that song back into Candide, and so I was his friend and colleague during the with new lyrics. (I was very young!) I still can writing of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and had see Steve Sondheim’s face, when he said “No the privilege of conducting most of the works in thanks, John! Do you know what it was like to this anthology for him, and at his request. And write words for that melody?” Think about that even if the very ﬁrst songs represented in this for a moment. collection were composed before I was born, they are very much part of my life. And therein is the And that brings us to the other celebration in this power of great music. It transcends time and book: Lenny’s collaborators. That they are the communicates directly to the heart while greatest people in the history of the Broadway frequently dazzling the brain. stage should say all there is to say about Leonard Bernstein. Lenny had the gift of melody and the genius to give that melody a unique harmony, an unusual And to take a few words from Stephen rhythm, or a special accompaniment: some Sondheim, even Lenny’s death has not parted us unique aspect that makes us sit up and take note. from his genius, his hand and his heart. The music is not easy to play or sing, and yet seems perfectly natural and logical. We hear it as American, but Bernstein expressed his Russian John Mauceri DNA, too. He once told me that Robert Fryer, the producer of Wonderful Town, told Lenny that he New York didn’t want “any of that Prokofﬁoff stuff” which May, 2006 he rightly heard in Fancy Free and On the Town.

Of all the astonishing aspects of this “highlights album,” consider for a moment that some of the very New York music in West Side Story comes from the same period as the fundamentally European Candide. “One Hand, One Heart” was in fact written for Candide but never used. It never even had a lyric until it became part of West Side Story.