Leonard Bernstein, songwriter: reference sources (web and print); selected songs; recordings, videos; miscellany

Overview and Commentary: Leonard Bernstein

William Zinsser. Easy to Remember The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs. Jaffrey, New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 2000,
p. 207.

On the Town was the show that got it all started--a skyrocket exploding over sober wartime Broadway in 1944. Comden and Green took the idea for their musical from a ballet, Fancy Free , that two young friends of theirs, the composer Leonard Bernstein and the choreographer Jerome Robbins, had created for Ballet Theatre. . . . Bernstein was signed to write the music and Robbins to stage the dances. Thus four brilliant careers were born on one night.

Characterizing his earliest collaborations on musicals as less than fully realized, Stephen Sondheim says his work on West Side Story (1957) was different:

Collaboration with Bernstein, Laurents and Robbins was another matter entirely. To begin with not only was I for the first time writing lyrics to someone else's music, the someone else was a legend verging on myth, whose score for On the Town , from the moment I'd heard it sizzling out of the orchestra pit when I was fourteen, had given me that rush of excitement you rarely get from musicals: a fresh individual and complex sound, a new kind of music.

Cafe Songbook Music-Video Cabinet: Leonard Bernstein

Thomas Hampson and the Metropole Orkest conducted by Eric Stern at the
Concertgebouw Amsterdam February 1998,
performing "Lonely Town,"
from Bernstein's On the Town

Leonard Bernstein An American Life
Music from the Radio Documentary
(including the four Bernstein songs from
On the Town
in the Cafe Songbook Catalog.
Various performers with Bernstein
conducting various orchestras)

On the Town (1944), studio original cast recording, 1960
featuring Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, Betty Comden,
Adolph Green, John Reardon and Nancy Walker

On the Town (the movie) with Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller, Jules Munchen, and
Betty Garrett (on the DVD The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection (also including Anchors Aweigh and Take Me out to the Ball Game)

"This lecture traces Bernstein's composer-activism back to "On the Town" of 1944, which was his first Broadway show and grew out of a fruitful collaboration with Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jerome Robbins. Produced with a racially integrated cast during WWII, On the Town crossed race lines boldly, and it did so in an era when racial segregation held firm yet faced increasing resistance. In the historical literature about Broadway, the show's racial advances have been ignored. Fusing musical and cultural history, this lecture draws upon manuscripts for "On the Town" in the Bernstein Collection to explore political activism embedded in the show, as well as to consider Bernstein's early fascination with the blues." (A Library of Congress presentation)
Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard (lecture includes performed material).

• Lonely Town
  
• Lucky to Be Me
• New York, New York
  
• Some Other Time

Research Resources: Leonard Bernstein

• Amazon (Bernstein related books, recordings, videos, etc.;
• Leonard Bernstein website
• DBOPM (Database Of Popular Music: song list; awards; hit songs; co-writers)
• Discogs.com (songwriting and arranging credits)
• Internet Broadway Database (Broadway productions and song credits)
• Internet Movie Database (brief biography, filmography, movie song credits)
• New York Public Library (catalog entries for books, recordings, scores, etc.)
• The New York Times (A guide to Bernstein in The Times)
• NPR Music (often includes audio segments);
• Songwriters Hall of Fame (biography and song list)
• Wikipedia (Bernstein article)
• Peyser, Joan. Bernstein: A Biography. New York: Morrow, 1987.
• Secrest, Meryl. Leonard Bernstein: A Life. New York: Vintage, 1995.
• Burton Bernstein and Barbara Haws, Eds. Leonard Bernstein: American Original. New York: Harper, 2008 (with essays by Alan Rich, Paul Boyer, Carol J. Oja and others).
• Stephen Holden. "The Porous Bernstein Border." The New York Times. Nov. 8, 2010 (A review of a concert including both classical and musical theater Bernstein).
• Thomas Hampton: leff56
• Tyne Daly, "I Can Cook": hernani76600

Notes

• Discussing the lyric writing team of Comden and Green, William Zinsser writes:
• Bernstein Meets Broadway by Carol Oja
• no comments posted as yet

Cite this page: Leonard Bernstein, songwriter: reference sources (web and print); selected songs; recordings, videos; miscellany, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songwriters/b_sws/bernstein_leonard.html