West Side Stories

Leonard Bernstein played piano from age 10, and attended Boston Latin School and Harvard University.  So he studied music theory before studying conducting and orchestration. In 1943, he was appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Then on November 14, 1943 he was summoned unexpectedly to substitute for the regular conductor Bruno Walter. His confidence and skill under such difficult circumstances and his overall talent marked the beginning of a new career. He later conducted the New York City Center Orchestra and appeared as a guest conductor in countries all over the world. In fact in 1953 he became the first American to conduct at La Scala in Milan. And from 1958 to 1969 Bernstein was conductor and musical Director of the New York Philharmonic. He made several international tours, and his popularity increased because of his skills as a conductor and pianist, but also as a commentator and even an entertainer.

Transcript

My name is George Bartley and this is episode 499 -  Street & Symphony - just one more episode until 500.  Today I'd like to talk about Leonard Bernstein - a composer who wrote music that might be at home with the pre-1900 musicians. He also wrote what is arguably the greatest Broadway score - that of   West Side Story. In my opinion, he would definitely deserve a place on this list If West Side Story was his only accomplishment.

Leonard Bernstein played piano from age 10, and attended Boston Latin School and Harvard University.  So he studied music theory before studying conducting and orchestration. In 1943, he was appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Then on November 14, 1943 he was summoned unexpectedly to substitute for the regular conductor Bruno Walter. His confidence and skill under such difficult circumstances and his overall talent marked the beginning of a new career. He later conducted the New York City Center Orchestra and appeared as a guest conductor in countries all over the world. In fact in 1953 he became the first American to conduct at La Scala in Milan. And from 1958 to 1969 Bernstein was conductor and musical Director of the New York Philharmonic. He made several international tours, and his popularity increased because of his skills as a conductor and pianist, but also as a commentator and even an entertainer.

He became extremely skilled at explaining classical music to young listeners on such television shows as omnibus and young people's concerts. As a composer, Leonard Bernstein wrote all kinds of music - making use of such diverse elements as biblical themes, Jazz rhythms, and even Jewish liturgical themes His best known works are the musicals On The Town, Wonderful Town, Candide. and of course, West Side Story - a piece that I'm going to talk a little bit more about later. He also received an Academy Award Nomination for writing the music to On The Waterfront.  And Leonard Bernstein also wrote The Joy of Music and Young People's Concerts for Reading and Listening. He wrote a piece called Mass for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing arts in Washington DC in September 1971. 

Now back to West Side Story -  

Picture a rehearsal room that smells like sawdust and sweat: piano lid open, a stack of manuscript paper, a metronome that never quite gets used. Jerome Robbins is marking steps with a finger snap that sounds like a gunshot. Arthur Laurents is adjusting a line for rhythm and bite. A young Stephen Sondheim, equal parts eager and skeptical, has a pencil behind his ear. And Leonard Bernstein—hair already in motion—leans into the keyboard, pulling a whole city out of its strings and hammers.

The seed started earlier than most people recall. In 1949, Robbins pitched a “Romeo and Juliet in New York” project to Bernstein and Laurents. The first draft concept was “East Side Story”—a clash between a Catholic boy and a Jewish girl around Easter–Passover. It felt topical, but not yet combustible. Years later, as Puerto Rican migration reshaped neighborhoods and headlines turned to youth gangs, the team reset the story: the Jets (white, working-class) and the Sharks (Puerto Rican newcomers). The retitle was inevitable: West Side Story. 

That change did more than swap zip codes. It gave Bernstein a palette: Latin dance forms rubbing against jazz harmony, concert-hall counterpoint charging right into street slang. It gave Robbins the movement vocabulary to put violence and flirtation in the same eight counts. It gave Laurents a book where wit and danger share the same block. And it gave Sondheim—on his Broadway debut as a lyricist—the most high-wire assignment in town. 

It has been said that West Side Story works because no one wins outright. Robbins insists on dance as story, not decoration. Laurents keeps the language crisp and unsentimental. Sondheim pushes against purple sentiment while serving character. And Bernstein…well, Bernstein insists that the music can take the weight of a tragedy—real tragedy—in a Broadway house. Nothing is “just a number”; everything advances pressure.

It’s a collaboration of arguments. Robbins wants clarity of action; Bernstein wants harmonic risk; Sondheim wants conversational rhyme; Laurents wants narrative momentum. The miracle is the compromise you hear: the show moves like a movie, sings like an opera, and talks like a street corner.

From the first musical bars, Leonard Bernstein brands the show with the “devil’s interval,” the tritone—the unstable distance that wants to resolve itself but won’t. You hear it whistled in the Prologue, you hear it when Tony sings “Ma-ri-a”; love and danger share a single interval. That’s the core metaphor: things that should resolve…don’t.

The song “America” has two pulses - 6/8 vs. 3/4. It’s wit set to rhythm: a debate about belonging that you can dance. In the 1961 film, the number becomes a sparring match between Shark women and men, sharpening the social argument while expanding the choreography’s bite. 

The show was first tested in Washington, D.C., and then Philadelphia in August 1957, tuning pacing and balance, while Robbins—a perfectionist’s perfectionist—drives dancers to the edge to make movement carry plot. 

Then the curtain goes up at the Winter Garden Theatre on September 26, 1957. Reviews clock the shock: this is darker, more integrated, and more kinetically staged than the average musical comedy. It runs 732 performances—a solid hit, if not a juggernaut. In the 1958 awards season, Robbins wins the Tony for Choreography, but Best Musical goes to The Music Man.

There are many reasons why West Side Story felt new, and still does
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West Side Story treats dance like camera work, cutting scenes with bodies instead of edits. It treats songs as psychological pressure, not pauses. And it refuses a happy ending without refusing beauty. The Library of Congress later called it one of the rare shows that fundamentally changed the form, noting that the original run was a success but that full audience embrace arrived after the film. That’s telling: sometimes the culture needs a second glare to realize what it’s looking at. 

The 1961 movie, co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, does two essential things: it keeps the choreography’s grammar and it opens the camera onto the city. Some numbers shift order or staging (as noted with “America”); “Gee, Officer Krupke” and “Cool” move places to adjust tone. Casting embraces star power (Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer) alongside knockout dancers (Rita Moreno, George Chakiris). Vocals are often dubbed—common then—but the visceral energy remains.

And the reception?   It was a landslide. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and wins 10, including Best Picture, Best Directors (shared by Wise and Robbins), and both supporting categories (Rita Moreno and George Chakiris). It becomes not just the most decorated movie musical of its time—it’s the vessel that carries Bernstein’s score into living rooms and high-school auditoriums for decades. 

The movie also demonstrated something that Bernstein did that no one else quite did. You see, Bernstein refused to choose between sophistication and immediacy. He smuggles Stravinsky-grade rhythm into a dance tune, Mahler-grade ache into a balcony song, and jazz voicings into a choral prayer (“Somewhere”). The harmony is restless, the tunes unforgettable, and the counterpoint lets characters argue simultaneously—which is how cities actually sound. He lets beauty and brutality share the same musical space.

It’s easy to romanticize the collaboration, but the engine is friction managed by trust. Jerome Robbins pushed so hard he was ultimately removed from the film midway (delays), yet his fingerprints—those angular bodies, that knife-edge unison—shape every frame. Sondheim longed to compose but learned how to tailor language to music and character in a trial by fire. Laurents kept the book unsentimental, preventing romance from dissolving the stakes. And Bernstein, the famous conductor who could have smoothed everything into concert sheen, never sanded down the danger.

It has been said that on Broadway, the shock was the form—dance as plot, tragic ending in a musical, harmonic teeth. On film, the shock becomes scale—you can feel the city, and America is ready to embrace the thing it first found “too much.” The result: the show’s reputation blooms post-1961, and school auditoriums, touring companies, revivals, and recordings multiply. For many listeners, Bernstein’s most-remembered melodies live here—not in the concert hall, but in a story about kids who run out of tomorrows. 

If awards are a weather report, then Broadway said “storm approaching” and Hollywood said “the storm arrived.” The 1957–59 run (plus a 1960 return) proved the show’s strength; 1958 Tonys split the ballot; 1961 Oscars settled it with a cascade. Decades on, the score hasn’t thinned; it just keeps finding new singers and new rooms. For Bernstein, who worried about the “high-low” divide his entire life, West Side Story was the bridge that held: symphonic craft walking across a popular street, and never breaking step. 

From what I understand, one of the numerous innovative techniques that the movie West Side Story utilized was having an orchestra play live in a pit on the motion picture set. A movie exactly like West Side Story had never been made before.

I know the first time I saw the movie version of West Side Story, at the very end I think I just sat there for 15 minutes unable to move - so touched by the overall effect of the music, the tragic story, and its expressions of the human condition.

Bernstein’s other achievements gleam, but West Side Story breathes. It’s the one place where a single interval can hold love and danger, where dance becomes camera, and where a pit orchestra sounds like a whole city at once. If you want the real Bernstein—the one who fused sophistication with street heat—you don’t have to search his collection of works. You just listen or watch West Side Story.”


Leonard Bernstein even played a role in the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall - a physical wall that separated the East Side of Berlin, Germany from the West Side of Berlin in Germany.  Now for some of you - especially if the Berlin wall was before your time - that might not be that big a deal or a little unclear - so I think I better go into some background to explain exactly what the Berlin Wall was.

For a lot of us, it’s hard now to imagine the sheer weirdness of Berlin during the Cold War.

You see, after World War II, Germany was divided into two countries. West Germany was aligned with the United States and Western Europe; East Germany with the Soviet Union. But Berlin—deep inside East German territory—was split in half. West Berlin was a small Western island inside a communist state. People could cross between the two parts of the city for a while… until too many East Germans started leaving.

In 1961, the East German government slammed that door shut.

Overnight, streets were cut off. Families, friends, co-workers were separated. What once was a free passage way was now barbed wire, concrete, guard towers, and armed soldiers. A physical wall curling more than 25 miles through the city, with more barriers sealing off West Berlin from the countryside beyond. Trying to escape could mean prison—or death. The world watched this concrete snake and gave it a name that sounded almost mythical: the Berlin Wall.

For 28 years it stood there, not just as a barrier, but as a symbol of the whole Cold War—this huge standoff between two systems, two nuclear-armed superpowers, two competing visions of freedom.

Fast-forward to 1989.

Across Eastern Europe, people began to push back: huge peaceful protests, new political movements, governments starting to crack. In East Germany, citizens poured into the streets, especially in Leipzig and Berlin. The system simply couldn’t hold. On November 9, an official stumbled through a confused announcement about new travel rules. Crowds surged to the checkpoints demanding to cross. Border guards, unprepared and overwhelmed, opened the gates.

Suddenly, the impossible was happening: East and West Berliners climbed on top of the Wall, danced, hugged, swung pickaxes. The barrier that had defined an era was being chipped away by ordinary people with hammers.

Now put Leonard Bernstein into that picture.

Bernstein was not just a famous conductor and composer; he was a fierce believer in music as moral speech. Anti-fascist, anti-racist, unapologetically political when he felt it mattered. So when the Wall fell, he didn’t just send flowers. He went to Berlin.

He was invited to conduct a concert to mark this new freedom, and for Bernstein there was really only one choice: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The piece with the “Ode to Joy” finale—Beethoven setting Friedrich Schiller’s poem about universal brotherhood, the vision of “all men become brothers.” A deaf composer writing, at the dawn of the 19th century, music that imagines a world without walls.

The Ninth had already lived many lives: used by dictators, by democracies, by revolutionaries, by New Year’s celebrations, by the European Union as its anthem. Bernstein understood all that history. In December 1989, he set out to reclaim the piece very specifically as an anthem for liberation.

He helped shape not just a concert, but an event.

First: the casting. Instead of using one national orchestra, he assembled an international ensemble that literally looked like the Cold War map being redrawn. Players came from both Germanies and from orchestras in New York, London, Paris, and what was then Leningrad. Choirs from East and West Germany, plus children from Dresden, shared the same stage. 

For an audience that had lived with the logic of division—“them” vs. “us,” Warsaw Pact vs. NATO—just seeing those musicians sitting side by side already sent a message.

On December 23, Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s Ninth in West Berlin’s Philharmonie—for a city that had lived as an island of freedom, now watching the wall that enclosed it begin to vanish. On December 25, Christmas Day, he led the symphony again in East Berlin - just steps from where the Wall had stood. 

Thousands of people gathered in the winter air to watch on giant screens: East and West Berliners standing together, listening to the same music in real time for the first Christmas of this new world. 

And then came Bernstein’s boldest gesture.

In the final movement, Schiller’s text praises Freude—“joy.” Bernstein asked the singers, just for this occasion, to change one crucial word: sing Freiheit—“freedom”—instead of Freude. So the chorus, in German, was no longer celebrating an abstract joy; it was literally singing an Ode to Freedom.

This was not Beethoven’s wording. Bernstein knew he was taking a liberty, and that some purists would bristle. But for him, that single word captured what people on the streets of Berlin had just risked their lives to claim. It turned a familiar masterpiece into a pointed, once-in-history statement: the dream Beethoven had wrapped in sound—of people joined beyond borders—was briefly, visibly, happening. 

If you watch footage from that night, you see an aging Bernstein, already ill, conducting with that mix of tension and tenderness that was uniquely his. He leans over the orchestra; he pulls the sound up with his hands; in the last pages, when chorus, soloists, and orchestra erupt together, his entire body seems to insist on the German word for freedom.  He’s not just beating time—he’s arguing a case.

For listeners who didn’t grow up with the Wall, here’s the key: This wasn’t just a concert “about Germany.”
It was a global checkpoint: proof that a division the world had been told was permanent could end without a world war.

And Bernstein chose Beethoven 9—the most famous musical shout of human unity—and adjusted it by one word to fit that exact political and spiritual moment.

And here’s where Leonard Bernstein, the teacher, the activist, the restless believer in human possibility, gives us one last image.

No West Side Story choreography. No Young People’s Concert script. No talk show. Just an aging musician in December 1989, standing in a newly opened Berlin and raising his hands for Beethoven.

He has in front of him an orchestra and chorus made up of musicians from both sides of a border that, a few weeks earlier, was lined with guns and searchlights. He has behind him a life spent insisting that music is not a luxury, but a language of conscience. And he has chosen the one symphony that dares to say, out loud, that human beings might someday learn to live without walls.

The finale begins quietly: low strings, a searching line, that musical argument you can almost hear Beethoven thinking through. Then, one by one, the themes reject darkness and move toward something larger. When the baritone enters to interrupt the turmoil, when the chorus rises, when the familiar melody finally arrives, the hall in East Berlin knows exactly what’s being said—whether they’ve studied the score or not.

Bernstein makes one bold change:— the German word for. “joy” in Beethoven's original becomes the German word for “freedom.” It is not Beethoven’s word, and he knows it. But in that moment, after decades of division, it is the word thousands of Berliners have just dragged from possibility into reality. Bernstein doesn’t deliver a speech; he lets that single word, sung again and again, do the work.

For listeners today, especially those who didn’t live through the Cold War, it helps to remember: people truly believed that wall might stand forever. That the map was fixed. That the world would always be split into hostile camps glaring at one another over concrete.

Bernstein did not bring the Wall down. But on that winter night, he gave the celebration a sound—and it was not cheap triumph. It was Beethoven’s furious, radiant demand that we recognize each other as brothers and sisters, and Bernstein’s faith that this demand still mattered.

A year later, Leonard Bernstein would be gone.

So when we think about his life, it’s tempting to list the obvious achievements: West Side Story, Candide, the Mahler recordings, the television lectures, the charisma, the cigarettes, the scandals, the legend. But I’d like to end elsewhere—with that image in Berlin.

An elderly conductor, carrying a score written by a deaf revolutionary 160 years earlier, standing in a city that had just proved that a dismal future is not as permanent as it looks.

No wall is eternal.
No map is final.
No leader or president is forever.
And in the right hands, music can be more than background—it can be a permanent witness.

That, in the end, may be Leonard Bernstein’s greatest performance.

So when we talk about Leonard Bernstein’s legacy, these Berlin performances belong right beside his Broadway scores and his Young People’s Concerts and his Mahler evangelism. In December 1989, he stood in a city that had been sliced in half for nearly three decades, and with musicians from former enemy nations, he turned “Ode to Joy” into “Ode to Freedom” and offered Beethoven’s Ninth as a soundtrack for walls coming down.

Join Celebrate Creativity for a very special episode dealing with the past, present, and future - Episode 500

And finally, if today’s episode has sparked your curiosity, I’d encourage you to hear Beethoven’s Ninth for yourself—especially with Leonard Bernstein on the podium. A powerful place to start is his historic 1989 “Ode to Freedom” performance in Berlin, recorded just weeks after the Wall came down, with an international orchestra and chorus gathered to celebrate newly-won freedom =   n  available on the major streaming services and on CD and DVD; listen to whichever you can find easily, but do take the time to experience the full symphony.

Thank you for listening to Celebrate Creativity