Leonard Bernstein

• Born: August 25, 1918, Lawrence, Massachusetts
• Died: October 14, 1990, New York City

Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront

• Composed: 1954
  
• Premiere: The Columbia Pictures film On the Waterfront was released July 28, 1954 with the soundtrack conducted by Morris Stoloff; the Symphonic Suite was premiered August 11, 1955 at the Berkshire Music Festival (Tanglewood) in Massachusetts, with the composer conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 
• Instrumentation: 2 flutes (incl. piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani (two players), bass drum, chimes, crash cymbals, glockenspiel, tam-tams, snare drum, suspended cymbals, triangle, 3 tuned drums, vibraphone, wood block, xylophone, harp, piano, strings
• CSO notable performances: First: November 1965 on a Pops concert, Skitch Henderson conducting. Most Recent: Fall 2017 European tour, Louis Langrée conducting.
• Duration: approx. 22 minutes

Although other of Leonard Bernstein’s dramatic scores were used in film adaptations (including the stage musicals On the Town and West Side Story), the 1954 Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront represented the only time he composed expressly for the cinema. The film’s scenario is a gritty tale of corruption and exploitation on the docks of New Jersey. Kazan finished filming—with an all-star cast of serious actors that included Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger and Eva Marie Saint—before he started worrying about the music. [Theatrical Trailer for On the Waterfront] When the producer Sam Spiegel first approached Bernstein about the project, the composer demurred. He was no fan of Kazan, who had gained notoriety in 1952 as an informant to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities, the rabid anti-Communist political incentive that exiled many performing-arts luminaries to the ranks of the unemployable. Bernstein was among the 50 arts celebrities who, in 1947, had signed a manifesto condemning those very proceedings. [For a captivating account of Bernstein’s political activities, see Barry Seldes’s Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of and American Musician] At least Kazan seemed sincere about ruing his participation in that circus. He took out an advertisement in The New York Times rationalizing that he had cooperated with the dark forces in the spirit of patriotism. [Kazan’s New York Times advertisement] On the Waterfront, which trains its unforgiving eye on the ethical dilemma that can pit loyalty to family and friends against the greater good, was a further step in his process of personal redemption.

Even on a strictly professional level, Bernstein did not harbor warmth for Kazan. He may have admired Kazan’s socially conscious film achievements, such as Gentleman’s Agreement (1947, which tackled the subject of anti-Semitism in America) and Pinky (1949, which blazed into the topic of racism), not to mention A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), but there was the unavoidable fact that when Kazan was approached about directing the Bernstein/Comden/Green/Robbins show On the Town back in 1944, he had flatly turned down the opportunity. One might not have predicted that the collaboration of Bernstein and Kazan, creative powerhouses both, would yield happy results.

Nonetheless, Bernstein consented to screen the film in its scoreless, rough-cut state and was immediately won over. “I heard music as I watched,” he later reported. “That was enough. And the atmosphere of talent that this film gave off was exactly the atmosphere in which I love to work and collaborate.… Day after day I sat at a movieola [sic], running the print back and forth, measuring in feet the sequences I had chosen for the music, converting feet into seconds by mathematical formula, making homemade cue sheets.” [What is a Moviola?]

On May 30, 1954, while engaged in composing the score for On the Waterfront, Bernstein published an article in The New York Times in which he addressed his experience composing for the film:

I had become so involved in each detail of the score that it seemed to me perhaps the most important part of the picture. I had to keep reminding myself that it really is the least important part, that a spoken line covered by music is a lost line, and by that much a loss to the picture, while a bar of music completely obliterated by speech is only a bar of music lost, and not necessarily a loss to the picture. Over and over again I repeated this little maxim to myself….

Sometimes there would be a general decision to cut an entire piece of music out of the picture because it seemed to “generalize” the emotional quality of a scene, whereas the director wished the scene to be “particularized.” Sometimes the music would be turned off completely for seconds to allow a line to stand forth stark and bare—and then be turned on again. Sometimes the music, which had been planned as a composition with a beginning, middle, and end, would be silenced seven bars before the end.

And so the composer sits by, protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting, be it with a heavy heart, the inevitable loss of a good part of the score. Everyone tries to comfort him. “You can always use it in a suite.” Cold comfort. It is good for the picture, he repeats numbly to himself: it is good for the picture.

The music Bernstein provided is tough, bluesy and profoundly urban. Its frugal melodic materials unroll with what his amanuensis Jack Gottlieb called concatenation, “a kind of chain-reaction procedure.” “Using few thematic ideas,” Gottlieb wrote, “the scenes are masterfully underpinned and interrelated. Particularly memorable is a fugato for percussion, pointing up the violence in the scenario, which gradually evolves into a love theme.”

The score underpins about 35 minutes of the film, which reflects the propensity of all Kazan films to use music sparingly but with terrific impact. On the Waterfront was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, including for best score, and it won eight. Bernstein’s score was passed over in favor of Dimitri Tiomkin’s music for The High and the Mighty. [Here is the list of award nominations and wins for On the Town] Kazan sent him a letter of condolence, assuring him that he hoped they could work together on another film. “I am furious about the Academy Awards,” the composer wrote to his personal secretary, Helen Coates. “It is obviously politics, and I don’t care, except that it would have jacked up my price for the next picture to double.” Indefensible in retrospect, this slight may account for why On the Waterfront remained Bernstein’s one and only film score.

In fact, Bernstein did avail himself of the “cold comfort” of recasting his music into a concert suite, which he (as conductor) and the Boston Symphony introduced at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood on August 11, 1955. The Symphonic Suite runs 22 minutes, nearly two-thirds the length of the complete film score. Prior to its premiere Bernstein explained: “The main materials from the suite undergo numerous metamorphoses, following as much as possible the chronological flow of the film score itself.” The Suite unrolls in five chapters. It opens with the broad, main-title theme (“Andante, with dignity”) and proceeds from there to a Presto barbaro, a tense section that escalates from music for percussion alone to a set of variations. The lyrical central section (“More flowing”) is the film’s love music, alluding to the romance between protagonist Terry and Edie, the girl who stirs him to stand up for the side of morality and human decency. The ensuing scherzo (Allegro non troppo, molto marcato) relates to the climactic fight between Terry and Johnny Friendly, an ironically named union boss who is in the pocket of the mobsters; and the opening music returns to close the Suite (as it had in the film), now with a subtle overlay of the love music and a sense of grim ambivalence about whether or not Terry’s act of moral defiance really leads to a better world.

—James M. Keller

* Portions of the Bernstein notes appeared previously in the programs of the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony and are used with permission. James M. Keller is in his 24th year as Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony and was formerly Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic and a staff writer-editor at The New Yorker. The author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University Press), he is writing a sequel volume about piano music.