Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

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