Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

THE STORY

In 1954, Leonard Bernstein was asked to compose his first film score. Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront is a tale of two brothers, Irish longshoremen embroiled in a moral crisis in the slums and docks of post-war Hoboken, New Jersey. Initially, he turned down the offer—between leading orchestras worldwide, he was serving as a visiting music professor at Brandeis University. But seeing a work print of the film brought about of change of mind. Bernstein took a leave of absence from Brandeis and flew to Los Angeles.

Bernstein had set music for the stage—in his one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti (1951) as well as in musicals On the Town (1944), Peter Pan (1950), and Wonderful Town (1953)—but film presented new challenges. In a New York Times interview, Bernstein confessed, “I had to keep reminding myself that [the score] 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.” Despite his difficulties in this new medium, Bernstein’s score won an Academy Award. The composer conducted the premiere of the symphonic suite at Tanglewood in 1955.

LISTEN FOR

• An introduction in horn and woodwinds which eases into a percussive section featuring a saxophone solo that climaxes to harsh dissonances
• A languid saxophone accompanied by violins (“with intensity”) ushering the listener into the suite’s love theme of harps and flute solo
• A scherzo-like section leading to the return of the (now developed and conclusive) opening horn introduction

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, E-flat clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two timpanis, percussion, piano, harp, strings