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There's a Place for Us: The Musical Theatre Works of Leonard Bernstein. By Helen Smith.

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ml/gct134

1477-4631

Simon A. T. Redfern,

Theatre and Performance Studies

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).