Love against hatred

by Petar PLAMENOV

4 July (Wednesday), 2012
Bulgaria Hall
Small hall, 19:00

Cycle Sound dialogues
Director: Ilia Mihaylov
Cast: Soloists of NFH Svetoslav Obretenov and ensemble at the National Philharmonic Orchestra, with special participation of students from American College
Program: Leonard Bernstein - West Side Story

Leonard Bernstein`s music in general is interesting, tuneful and memorable. There is a distinctive sound that is his and his alone, with syncopation and variation and a love of difficult time signatures. His music evokes many emotional reactions. Even when the wordsmith fails, the melody is still often compelling. And hearing his music live makes me wish I had been able to witness him conduct in person; his melodies are as impassioned and enthusiastic and full of life as he was on the conducting platform. 

Of all the contributions of American culture to the arts, the Broadway musical is one of the most significant. Its predecessor, the European operetta (a play with spoken dialogue but abundant singing in operatic style), typically featured exotic settings, aristocratic characters, and wildly improbable plots. Although the musical's roots were in England, it quickly evolved in the hands of such geniuses as Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart and the incomparable George and Ira Gershwin into a distinctively American form featuring popular songs, many of which were to become "standards," still widely performed and loved today.



Leonard Bernstein took the musical to new heights of seriousness in his 1957 production, West Side Story, based loosely on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Its true subject was the growing menace of gang warfare (or "juvenile delinquency" as it was known then) in the context of racial tensions created by clashes between whites and Puerto Rican immigrants. Consciousness of racism was very much on the rise in the U.S. of the late fifties; and Bernstein, a life-long liberal, wanted to portray the issue in an uncompromising fashion.

The subject is treated in a fairly complex fashion. Note especially "I Want to Live in America," which expresses the ambiguous feelings of the immigrants about their homeland while forthrightly condemning American white racism. Some people feel this number reinforces stereotypes about Latinos, and the musical has been the target of protests in some areas on that grounds. Originally the script was to have dealt with a Christian/Jewish romance (called "East Side Story"), but Bernstein decided to choose a more immediately relevant theme. Ironically, neither Broadway nor Hollywood was able to rise above its own institutionalized racism to cast a Latina actress as Maria.

The gangs of that time were much less well armed than today's, and the exigencies of stage and film production in the fifties forced the libretto to use somewhat censored language (somewhat dated now, but fairly hip then), so that the modern viewer may be tempted to look at this story of gang warfare as somewhat innocent and naive. But at a deeper level, the hatreds and frustrations articulated here are authentic reflections of an ongoing American tragedy.

West Side Story features classic dances by Jerome Robbins, especially in the hyper-athletic masculine style pioneered by choreographer Agnes de Mille in Rodeo and Oklahoma , and several extraordinarily beautiful songs, many of which have become classics. Bernstein, at this time the most famous conductor in the world, leading the New York Philharmonic, and exponent of a wide range of classical and popular music, had the skills to write music considerably more complex that contained in most musicals.

The musical style is based on hard-hitting big band jazz and Latin-beat music like the mambo. Popular dance music had not settled exclusively on rock and roll yet when this work was being written. If a musical is not an opera, neither is it a play. It is necessary to accept the fact that characters are constantly bursting into either song or dance. It is in these songs and dances that the very essence of the musical exists.

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