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

with Tony. The first ascending three notes of the song “Cool” are the same as “Maria” (a tritone followed by a minor second), but instead of lingering on the tritone resolution, “Cool” focuses on the tritone, for example the tritone ascent on “crazy” followed by a tritone descent on “Boy.” (The “cool fugue” dance after the song alternates between statement of the hate motive in its pure Jet gang form and the first three notes of “Somewhere” [“There’s a place”] with interjections from the two-note “someday, somewhere” motive.)

The Maria motive or “love motive” of course dominates the song “Maria,” where each repetition of the heroine’s name conveys the message that Maria, to an even greater extent than her romantic counterpart, can resolve dramatic tensions. Maria’s motive returns at other timely occasions during the remainder of the musical: throughout the orchestral underscoring that introduces the Balcony Scene that encompasses “Tonight”; in “Under Dialogue” as a cha-cha (a rare omission in Bernstein’s “complete” 1985 recording); in the underscoring that marks the moment Tony and Maria declare themselves married directly prior to “One Hand, One Heart”; and at various other places in the orchestral accompaniment to this last-mentioned song and the Ballet Sequence. Thereafter, the full three-note Maria motive becomes displaced by its dramatic (and musical) associate, the third “Somewhere” motive (c3 in Example 13.4), which presents a readily apparent rhythmic association with the last two syllables of Maria’s name.

The drama concludes with a “real” death procession (in contrast to the dream procession earlier in the Ballet Sequence of the second act). In the final moments Bernstein presents three statements of the third “Somewhere” motive (c2) with its customary rising whole-step (Example 13.10a). In the first two statements the bass answer to this C-major triadic resolution in the melody (C-E-G) is none other than the note that will complete the sinister tritone against C (F) for two statements. In the third and final statement, Bernstein allows an undiluted C major to stand alone.84 Certainly it is possible to interpret the absence of a third F as an optimistic ending, or at least more positive than if Bernstein had chosen to state the tritone the third time as well.

The screen version of West Side Story adds a third tritone to accompany the end credits. The original movie soundtrack album, however, departs both from the Broadway and the film ending in its musical resolution of the drama. As shown in Example 13.10b it abandons tritones altogether for all three statements of the “Somewhere” motive.85 Why did the soundtrack do this? Here is one possible explanation. Despite the fact that the film omitted the Dream Ballet Sequence (based on “Somewhere”), except as underscoring at the beginning of act II, scene 3, the producers of the soundtrack wanted to find a place for the song “Somewhere.” When first released, the soundtrack therefore used the dream version of this song, but now sung by the principals rather than an off-screen “Girl,” to conclude the recording. For this reason the original soundtrack concluded with an unambiguously positive major ending that avoids tritones entirely.86

Example 13.10. “Finale” and “Procession and Nightmare” (conclusions)

(a) Broadway ending (“Finale”)

(b) Conclusion of “Procession and Nightmare” and the film soundtrack

To better depict an age when gang warfare is still rampant and exponentially more violent than it was on the West Side in 1957 or 1961, Bernstein, in his operatic recorded reinterpretation of the score he conducted in 1985, departs from his Broadway ending. This time he has the orchestra follow the third statement of the “Somewhere” motive with a third tritone as in the “End Credits” that followed the drama in the film. But even in the 1985 recording Bernstein allows a hopeful glimmer of C major to sound when he instructs the orchestra to quickly release the third tritone.

Maria lives, but Bernstein, despite numerous attempts, was unable to create an operatic aria for her that rang true. Thus in her most Wagnerian moment Maria does not sing. In an opera, Maria, albeit “skinny—but pretty” and “delicate-boned” in contrast to the “fat lady” of operatic legend, would have no choice but to sing in order to inform audiences that the evening was over. Despite this conspicuous departure from operatic expectations, even requirements, West Side Story has been said to achieve genuine tragedy because “for the first time in a musical the hero sings while dying.”87 Perhaps more significantly, when Tony is carried off, the music of West Side Story has, metaphorically speaking, the last word. Audiences unaware of the musical relationships between death (“Procession”) and love (“I Have a Love”) and their mutual source in Wagner’s “redemption” motive (Example 13.8a–c) nevertheless cannot fail to understand that the love of Tony and Maria, like that of Siegmund and Sieglinde, Brünnhilde and Siegfried, and of course Romeo and Juliet, has redeemed the tragedy of youthful death.

After West Side Story Bernstein failed to succeed on Broadway with a completely new musical, but a considerably revamped Candide directed by Hal Prince (which included Sondheim’s newly created “Life Is Happiness Indeed,” a reworded “Venice Gavotte”), triumphed in 1974. Two years later Bernstein produced a musical with librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Although this promising but problematic show vanished after only seven Broadway performances, Bernstein managed to salvage portions of its score in his last compositions, and after his death it was reworked by Charlie Harmon and Sid Ramin into A White House Cantata: Scenes from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One song, the anthem “Take Care of This House” (originally sung by Abigail Adams in the White House), has since served as a talisman to protect many buildings, from houses of worship to the Kennedy Center. In 1983, Bernstein, who by then was focusing most of his creative energies on conducting, completed his final work for the musical stage, the opera A Quiet Place. A sequel to Trouble in Tahiti three decades later, A Quiet Place also recycled the former work (as a