Three Dance Episodes from On the Town
Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1918, and died in New York on October 14, 1990. The Broadway show On the Town grew out of the 1944 ballet Fancy Free, a collaboration between Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins for New York’s American Ballet Theatre; On the Town, with a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green based on Robbins’s scenario, opened on Broadway in December 1944. Bernstein extracted the Three Dance Episodes for concert performance in 1945 and led the premiere with the San Francisco Symphony on February 3, 1946.
The score for the Three Dance Episodes calls for 1 flute (doubling piccolo), 1 oboe (doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1st doubling E-flat clarinet, 2nd doubling alto saxophone, and 3rd doubling bass clarinet), two horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion (xylophone, suspended cymbal, wood block, triangle, trap set, snare drum, bass drum), piano, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Conductor, pianist, composer, educator, and all-around musical personality, Bernstein was the epitome of the versatile musician. As a composer he embraced styles from the vernacular to the learned in a mix that never failed to communicate directly with audiences. One of our greatest Broadway composers, he also wrote three major, serious-minded symphonies and had an abiding love for the musical lineages of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, whose influences emerged constantly in his own music.
When Leonard Bernstein made his famous New York Philharmonic debut as a 25-year-old conductor in November 1943, he was only a few years removed from his Harvard years, his conducting studies with Serge Koussevitzky and composition with Aaron Copland as part of the inaugural class of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Berkshire (now Tanglewood) Music Center, and his Boston Pops conducting debut at the Hatch Shell on Boston’s Charles River. In February 1944 he made his BSO debut as both conductor and composer with his own Symphony No. 1, Jeremiah, also leading his friend and mentor Copland’s El Salón México on a program he shared with his other mentor, Koussevitzky.
So Bernstein’s symphonic bona fides as both conductor and composer were well established when his ballet collaboration with Jerome Robbins, Fancy Free, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera with the American Ballet Theatre and the Ballet Theatre Orchestra led by the composer in April 1944. The score of this immediately popular work leaned strongly toward jazz and popular music, and although Bernstein insisted its offspring, the musical On the Town, shared not a note with the ballet’s score, the attentive listener might easily hear strong resemblances between the two works.
On the Town premiered only a few months after Fancy Free. Robbins’s story line for Fancy Free, which depicted three sailors on shore leave in New York City, was adapted and expanded by the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, remarkably making their debut as book writers and lyricists. (They also starred in the show.) The creative team had high hopes for the musical, which was in part funded by MGM in anticipation of turning it into a movie. The show ran on Broadway for 462 performances, closing in February 1946, and has seen several major revivals since. The sailor trio in the original cast featured John Battles as Gabey, Adolph Green as Ozzie, and Cris Alexander as Chip; their women counterparts were Sono Osato as Ivy, Betty Comden as Claire, and Nancy Walker as Hildy.
In the 1949 film version, starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin as the sailor trio, only four of Bernstein’s numbers — “I Feel Like I’m not out of Bed Yet,” “New York, New York,” “Presentation of Miss Turnstiles,” and “Come up to My Place” — were kept in the score.
As Bernstein would later do with his most famous musical, West Side Story, Bernstein quickly created from his On the Town Broadway score a suite of three symphonic pieces for concert performance, since he was suddenly in great demand as a guest conductor. Each of the Three Dance Episodes is dedicated to a principal cast member of the original production: The Great Lover to Sono Osato, Lonely Town: Pas de deux to Betty Comden, and Times Square: 1944 to Nancy Walker.
The three movements are arranged for greatest contrast, fast-slow-fast. The first, Dance of the Great Lover, is based on music from late in the show when Gabey, having spent much of his leave trying to catch up with Ivy (who was voted Miss Turnstiles as part of a promotion for New York’s transit system), falls asleep on the subway to Coney Island and dreams himself the Great Lover, arriving to sweep Ivy off her feet. The second movement is based on a scene in which Gabey, feeling sorry for himself after striking out in his search for love, has his cynicism reinforced by seeing a callous sailor dismiss an adoring young woman. The pas de deux is an instrumental reworking of the song Lonely Town. (Bernstein would cleverly reverse this approach in West Side Story, foreshadowing the song Maria in the scene The Dance at the Gym.) The last episode, Times Square: 1944, draws from the show’s most famous number, New York, New York, which is reprised in a central instrumental and choreographed number, the Time Square Ballet.
Bernstein followed up his success with On the Town with his relatively unknown 1951 musical Peter Pan, for which he also wrote the lyrics, 1953’s Wonderful Town, Candide (1956), based on Voltaire’s novel, and finally West Side Story (1957), all in the span of just over a decade. (Like On the Town, the idea for West Side Story also originated with Jerome Robbins in the 1940s, evolving from a story about star-crossed lovers from Jewish and Catholic backgrounds to become the Puerto Rican/White pair of Maria and Tony.) In parallel with all this, his reputation as a conductor and concert composer continued to rise. He had become a regular guest conductor with the BSO and was a steady presence at Tanglewood. Among other things, he led the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes with the Tanglewood Music Center and the world premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie at Symphony Hall with the BSO. He was also the piano soloist in the world premiere of his own Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, with the BSO with Serge Koussevitzky conducting. In 1954 he wrote his only film score, for On the Waterfront. Despite or because of the success of West Side Story, Bernstein turned away from Broadway entirely for nearly twenty years before writing his last musical, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with Broadway royalty Alan Jay Lerner to mark the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, which despite its creative team never matched the staying power of his earlier stage works.
Robert Kirzinger
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.