Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story is so familiar today that it’s easy to forget how breathtakingly original it seemed when it opened on Broadway on September 26, 1957. Loosely based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the show projected the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers onto a street-gang rivalry between the all-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins combined elements of European opera, Latin music and dance, and American popular musical theater into what has been described as a “Broadway opera.” When the composer asked the show’s orchestrators, Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, to extract a symphonic suite from West Side Story in 1960, they jumped at the chance to revise the original scoring for a small pit orchestra. “We were in ecstasy!” Ramin recalled. “Every orchestral color was ours for the asking; strings could be subdivided ad infinitum, percussion could be spread out among many players, winds and brass were expanded; and our only concern was whether the classically oriented symphonic player could handle the ‘jazzier’ elements of the score.”
The Symphonic Dances seamlessly stitch together nine of the musical’s numbers. Bernstein’s music runs the gamut from Latin beats and popular song styles to jazzy dance rhythms and hints of early rock ’n’ roll. By contemporary Broadway standards, the score was daringly dissonant: Witness the menacing tritone (the interval of an augmented fourth) that pervades the music of both Jets and Sharks in the Prologue. The raw kinetic energy of the opening number melts into the yearning strains of “Somewhere.” That in turn fades out to the motif of a rising whole step, a basic building block of the ensuing Scherzo. This is followed by a pair of Latin dances—a fast, syncopated Mambo and a more relaxed Cha-Cha. The signature tritone recurs in the short “Meeting Scene” that leads to a coolly atonal fugal treatment of the Jets’ ballet. The suite climaxes in the “Rumble”—in the original musical, the scene in which the rival gang leaders are killed—then segues to the tender Finale by way of a newly composed flute solo.
—Harry Haskell
The heath, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is the bare, windswept place, devoid of civilization and human comforts, where Lear, the Fool, and others end up after Lear’s eldest two daughters—to whom he has unwisely bequeathed his kingdom—have systematically stripped him of the last shreds of his authority. It is on the heath that Lear loses touch with reality, or at least with the world of unchecked privilege that he has inhabited for his whole life, and enters a state somewhere between madness and prophecy, a kind of lucid nightmare.
But the heath is more than a mere geological site; it is the psychological bedrock of the entire play. King Lear expresses a bottomlessly bleak vision of human nature, one in which laws, customs, and hierarchies—what we call “norms” in the contemporary world—are a flimsy safeguard against devouring animal appetites. When Lear lets his guard down for an instant and makes a major decision for sentimental reasons rather than according to the dictates of realpolitik, the wolves that surround him instantly show their fangs.
So, even though my orchestral piece does not directly enact the play’s heath scenes, Heath felt like the only possible title. This play’s inner landscape is a rocky, barren place, one in which every human luxury is ultimately burned away to reveal the hard stone underneath: “the thing itself,” as Lear puts it.
Heath is divided into four sections, played continuously with no break. The first and longest, “The Divided Kingdom,” embodies the atmosphere of the play’s first scenes: the uneasy sense of rituals failing to serve their purpose, of political life unraveling into chaos. The second section, “The Fool,” is full of darting, quicksilver music inspired by the Fool’s mockery of Lear. The brief third section, “I have no way ...”, is inspired by the blinded Gloucester’s slow, sad progress across the landscape. And the final movement, “With a Dead March,” embodies the accumulated tragedies of the play’s final scenes.
—Matthew Aucoin
Like many of Tchaikovsky’s works, the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture has an autobiographical subtext: the composer’s infatuation—his first and apparently only genuinely romantic heterosexual relationship—with a Belgian soprano named Désirée Artôt in the fall and winter of 1869. Although the 29-year-old composer avowed that he was “enraptured” by Artôt’s “gestures and the gracefulness of her movements and her posture,” the realization that either he or she would have to make a painful career sacrifice soon put paid to thoughts of marriage. In the aftermath of their short-lived affair, Tchaikovsky transferred his gaze to Shakespeare’s fictional couple. The idea originated with his composer friend Mily Balakirev, fresh from the completion of his own “oriental fantasy” for piano, Islamey. Balakirev not only suggested the concert-overture format but provided a detailed musical outline for the piece. Unlike Berlioz’s choral-symphonic Roméo et Juliette, Tchaikovsky’s Shakespearean fantasy is purely orchestral, a symphonic poem in which the drama inheres in the music rather than emanating from an extramusical program. Like Liszt’s Hamlet and Dvořák’s Othello, the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture distills Shakespeare’s play to its dramatic essence: the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers set against the festering blood-feud between the Montagues and Capulets.
If Tchaikovsky’s affair with Artôt lay behind the music he wrote in 1869, his complicated later love life undoubtedly colored his two subsequent revisions of the score, in 1870 and 1880. The end result was an emotional rollercoaster in free sonata form propelled by the intricate interplay of two contrasting themes, the first violent and sharply syncopated, the second serene and rapturously lyrical. (For good measure, Tchaikovsky added a subsidiary third theme, a series of solemn, hymnlike chords that is usually said to evoke Friar Laurence.) Enhancing the music’s emotive power is the sumptuous orchestration, including a beefed-up brass section and prominent parts for harp and timpani. By the time the fantasy overture had reached its final form, Tchaikovsky was hatching plans for a full-scale operatic version of Romeo and Juliet. “This shall be my definitive work,” he told his brother Modest. “It’s odd how until now I hadn’t seen how I was truly destined to set this drama to music. Nothing could be better suited to my musical character. No kings, no marches, and none of the encumbrances of grand opera—just love, love, love.” Although the opera remained unfinished, Tchaikovsky recycled music from the fantasy overture in a fragmentary scene that came to light after his death.
—Harry Haskell
Over the course of Verdi’s long career, his style evolved from the simple, clear-cut structures of such old-fashioned number operas as Ernani and Il Trovatore to the complex, seamless idiom of Otello and Falstaff. The latter are widely counted among the most successful of all Shakespearean adaptations for the operatic stage. For this, credit is shared by Verdi’s master librettist and fellow composer Arrigo Boito (1842–1918). Although belonging to very different generations, the two men shared a reverence for the Bard. “He is one of my very special poets,” said Verdi, “and I have had him in hand since my earliest youth, and I read and re-read him continually.” Both men had tried their hands at operatizing Shakespeare before, Verdi in his 1847 Macbeth (which he pronounced a “fiasco”) and Boito in his 1865 libretto for another composer’s long-forgotten Hamlet. In Otello (1887), the now older and wiser Boito’s strategy was to condense and simplify Shakespeare’s plot while preserving as much as possible of his dramatic structure and language. In cutting the number of speaking/singing roles by almost half, he transformed the complex, enigmatic Iago into a pasteboard villain and the ingenue Desdemona into an autonomous, self-aware heroine—a woman, as Joseph Kerman observed, “as capable of adultery as she is of passion in the grand manner. Her religiosity, true to this conception, is constant but superficial. And [Puccini’s] La Tosca is peeping out from under her petticoats.”
Indeed, the first half of Act IV is virtually a solo scena for Desdemona, whose ravishingly beautiful elaboration of Shakespeare’s plaintive Willow Song (Act IV, Scene 3) is followed by an interpolated Ave Maria—a nod, presumably, to Verdi’s Catholic audience—as she recites her bedtime prayers, attended by the loyal Emilia. At this point, poetry veers into melodrama. In a menacing and—in the original disposizione scenica, or production book, for the opera—precisely choreographed pantomime (Shakespeare’s Act V, Scene 2), the murderously jealous Otello steals into his sleeping wife’s bedchamber and kisses her awake, while the orchestra plays a tender reminiscence of their passionate love duet in Act I. Verdi’s unerring sense of musical dramaturgy, and Boito’s skill in compressing Shakespeare’s text, are on full display in the opera’s climactic scene: Accusing Desdemona of adultery, the vengeful Moor of Venice first throttles her and then, confronted with proof that Iago’s story of her infidelity is a tissue of lies, stabs himself. Dispensing with Shakespeare’s eloquent speech in his own defense, Otello drags himself to his wife’s corpse, kisses her for the last time, and expires in time-honored operatic fashion with a breathless sob. Thus ends what Kerman characterizes as “a drama of love and jealousy that glances forward to the verismo theatre as surely as it peers back to the Elizabethan.”
—Harry Haskell