There’s a Place for Us: The Musical Theatre Works of Leonard Bernstein by Helen Smith (review)

In 1948 Aaron Copland surveyed the new voices of American composition for an article in the New York Times. Harold Shapero, Lukas Foss, and Alexei Haieff were among those mentioned, as was John Cage, of whom Copland wrote, ‘I fear that Cage’s music has more originality of sound than of substance’ (‘The New “School” of American Composers’, New York Times, 14 March 1948). While time may have brought this assessment of Cage into question, Copland’s musings on the then 29-year-old Leonard Bernstein seem prescient indeed. ‘It is possible that some form of stage music will prove to be Bernstein’s finest achievement’ he suggested, and few now would argue against that.

The term ‘stage music’ encompasses the myriad of theatrical genres in which Bernstein worked. By 1948 he had composed the incidental music for two student productions of plays by Aristophanes, The Birds (1939) and The Peace (1941), and successfully made the transition to professional theatrical composer with scores for the ballets Fancy Free (1944) and Facsimile (1946), and the musical On the Town (1944). During the 1950s he composed almost exclusively for the theatre: he provided music for two plays, Peter Pan (1950) and The Lark (1955), tackled opera and operetta for the first time in Trouble in Tahiti (1952) and Candide (1956), and continued to establish himself on Broadway, first with the light-hearted Wonderful Town (1953) and secondly with the career-defining West Side Story (1957).

Despite being at the height of his powers, it was to be fourteen years before another Bernstein score would be premiered in a theatre, a hiatus explained by his appointment as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. When he did return it was with the hybrid work Mass (1971), a ‘theatre piece for singers, dancers and players’, followed by a further ballet Dybbuk (1974), the musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976), and, finally, the opera A Quiet Place (1983). There were numerous planned projects never fulfilled and half-finished scores that were abandoned too—all casualties of failed collaborations and overly full schedules. Still, much of Bernstein’s compositional legacy rests on this extensive output of theatre works and so it is surprising that there has been no single study covering them all. It is this gap Helen Smith has sought to fill with There’s a Place for Us.

Smith’s aim is to reveal Bernstein’s compositional process and, because theatrical works span his whole career, draw wider conclusions about Bernstein as a composer. The approach is straightforward in that each work is taken in turn as a chapter with a brief contextual section preceding a study of the music. The book’s title states it is ‘The Musical Theatre Works of Leonard Bernstein’ but it is worth qualifying that the author is focusing on lyric theatre. The four musicals, two operas, operetta, and theatre piece are in, but the ballets and music for plays (including the music for Peter Pan, which includes songs) are out.

A curious inclusion can be found in the chapter on Mass, when Smith discusses the Chichester Psalms (1965). She explains: ‘It is only right that any consideration of Bernstein’s musical theatre works should include an analysis of Chichester Psalms, as the piece has its origins very firmly in the theatre’ (p. 200). This is not a wholly convincing argument. Bernstein incorporated excerpts cut from West Side Story and music composed for a show that never made it to the stage (The Skin of Our Teeth), but this still does not qualify it as a theatre work anymore than his Second Symphony, The Age of Anxiety, which contains music cut from On the Town. The inclusion of the Chichester Psalms also raises the question as to why Peter Pan is only mentioned twice in passing.

Two of the works assessed, Candide and 1600 Pennsylvania...