A principal reason for the continuing significance of West Side Story in the musical theatre repertory is the quality of the score, with memorable songs and dance music that are intimately tied to the plot. This chapter opens with brief consideration of significant matters for Bernstein and Sondheim as they created the score. Description of the orchestration, which Bernstein accomplished with the assistance of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, includes the process and a description of the show’s three major soundscapes and how they interact in the score. Bernstein’s unification of the score involves shared melodic and rhythmic motives, identified here and documented through musical examples. The approach to individual numbers involves important material concerning their composition and significant aspects of lyrics and music, documented with many references to the 1957 and 2009 original cast recordings and Bernstein’s 1984 studio recording of the score.

West Side Story has long been important in the international market. This chapter provides four vignettes of its presence outside of the United States. Attempts to make the show one of the pieces of American culture that the US State Department allowed to tour in the USSR in the 1950s were unsuccessful, but the 1961 film helped make West Side Story known there and its sense of integration between various elements aligned closely with Soviet artistic conceptions. The film became very popular in Spain, where staged versions did not appear until tours in the 1980s. The first two professional Spanish productions premiered in Barcelona in 1996 and Madrid in 2018. Jerome Robbins took an American cast to England in 1958, creating a sensation first in Manchester and then in London. A Finnish production in Tampere Theater in 1963 proved popular and played briefly in Vienna in 1965.

Stephen Schwartz entered Bernstein’s life at a crucial moment when the composer needed assistance in writing Mass, especially with the lyrics for English ‘tropes’ that transmit much of the show’s message and political commentary. Schwartz has stated that he also helped Bernstein develop the loose plot that ties Mass together as an organic whole, an assertion that has been accepted by the Leonard Bernstein Office. Bernstein and Schwartz were very rushed and worked through the score mostly in performance order with little time for revisions. This chapter includes biographical material on Schwartz before he worked on Mass and his recollections of which lyrics he wrote for the show, his opinions on Mass and the work’s continuing popularity, his memories of working with Bernstein, how Schwartz later revised his lyrics for Mass, and how he has felt the influence of the older composer in his own Broadway works.

This chapter describes Bernstein’s education, which prepared him well for his chosen activities. His primary and secondary education took place at William Lloyd Garrison School in Roxbury, MA, and his final six years at the demanding Boston Latin School. Bernstein then attended Harvard College, where he earned an A.B. in Music in 1939. His early life also included two hours of daily Hebrew study at the family’s temple from age eight until his Bar Mitzvah. In addition to his largely academic training in music at Harvard, Bernstein studied piano privately from age ten until his college graduation, and then for two years attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied conducting with Fritz Reiner and piano with Isabelle Vengerova, earning an M.M. His formal study and the many connections that he made while at Harvard and Curtis helped make possible Bernstein’s rapid success as a conductor and composer.

Few would argue the premise that Leonard Bernstein’s music sounds prototypically American. Most of his works include numerous passages that would only have been written by someone from the United States, especially one active from the 1940s to the 1980s. His frequent cultivation of musical tropes associated with various types of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, rock, Latin music, and concert music by the likes of Aaron Copland help make Bernstein’s interest in an American sound perhaps the single most significant factor that defines his musical style. This chapter considers how that style developed in terms of when and how he discovered and incorporated major American musical styles. The musical influences blend with other inspirations from Jewish music and Western concert music to render Bernstein one of the most eclectic composers of his generation.

Bernstein wrote five books during his life: The Joy of Music (1959), The Infinite Variety of Music (1966), Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (1962), The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (1976), and Findings (1982). The first four were part of his desire to make his lectures and commentary from his televised appearances available in written form and the fifth book is a compilation of mostly minor writings from throughout Bernstein’s life. This chapter is a summary of the contents of each of these books, with commentary on what the more substantial efforts tell us about the author’s musical philosophy. The major essay from Findings considered here at some length is Bernstein’s senior honours thesis written while a student at Harvard: ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’. Although better known as a conductor and composer, Bernstein’s writings are also important representations of his thinking.