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NOTESONTHE PROGRAMBy James M. Keller, Program AnnotatorThe Leni and Peter May Chair

Leonard Bernstein struggled to balance the competing demands on his time to a degree

unusual even for musicians. Composing andconducting both laid claim to his calendar, butso did his other pursuits as a pianist, mediapersonality, writer, educator, social activist,and all-around celebrity. Time for compositionwas potentially the most endangered part ofthe mix, and he had to take special care to seethat it didn’t get crowded out by his day-to-dayobligations as a performer. When wearing hiscomposer’s hat Bernstein could be achameleon, turning on a dime between musicof complex modernity and pieces that plumbeda more popular vein. He was a success in a sur-prisingly broad spectrum of musical life, pro-ducing not only important contributions to thesymphonic repertoire but also ballets, operas,and such Broadway classics as On the Townand West Side Story.

Although other Bernstein dramatic scoreswere used in film adaptations (including bothof those stage musicals), the 1954 Elia Kazanfilm On the Waterfront represented the onlytime he composed expressly for the cinema.The film’s scenario is a gritty tale of corruptionand exploitation on the docks of New Jersey.Kazan had already finished filming (with an all-star cast that included Marlon Brando, Lee J.Cobb, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, and Eva MarieSaint) before he started worrying about themusic. When the producer Sam Spiegel first ap-proached Bernstein about the project, the com-poser demurred. He was no fan of Kazan, who had gained notoriety as an informant toSenator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-AmericanActivities Committee in 1952, the rabid

anti-Communist political incentive that exiledmany performing-arts luminaries to the ranksof the unemployable. Bernstein was among the50 arts celebrities who, in 1947, had signed amanifesto condemning those very hearings. Atleast Kazan seemed sincere about ruing his par-ticipation in those hearings. He took out an ad-vertisement in TheNew York Times rationalizingthat he had cooperated with the dark forces inthe spirit of patriotism, and On the Waterfront,which trains its unforgiving eye on the ethicaldilemma that can pit loyalty to family andfriends against the greater good, was a furtherstep in his process of personal redemption.

Even on a strictly professional level, Bern-stein did not harbor warmth for Kazan. He mayhave admired such of Kazan’s socially con-scious film achievements as Gentleman’s Agree-

On the Waterfront

Leonard Bernstein

IN SHORT

Born: August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts

Died: October 14, 1990, in New York City

Work composed: 1954

World premiere: The Columbia Pictures film Onthe Waterfront was released July 28, 1954, withthe sound track conducted by Morris Stoloff.

New York Philharmonic premiere: this performance, which is the first-ever presentationof the film with the sound track performed live

Estimated duration: ca. 108 minutes

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ment (1947, which tackled the subject of anti-Semitism in America) and Pinky (1949, whichblazed into the topic of racism), not to mentionA Streetcar Named Desire (1951), but there wasthe unavoidable fact that when Kazan was ap-proached about directing On the Town back in1944, he had flatly turned down the opportu-nity. One might not have predicted that the col-laboration of these two creative powerhouseswould yield happy results.

Nonetheless, Bernstein consented to screenthe film in its scoreless, rough-cut state andwas immediately won over. He later reported:

I heard music as I watched. That wasenough. And the atmosphere of talent thatthis film gave off was exactly the atmospherein which I love to work and collaborate. …Day after day I sat at a movieola, running theprint back and forth, measuring in feet thesequences I had chosen for the music, con-verting feet into seconds by mathematicalformula, making homemade cue sheets.

In all, Bernstein’s music accompanies about45 minutes of the film, which reflects thepropensity of all Kazan films to use music

In the Composer’s Words

On May 30, 1954, while engaged in composing the score for On the Waterfront, Leonard Bernstein publishedan article in The New York Times in which he addressed his experience. He wrote of visiting the “Upper Dub-bing” room in the Sound Department Building at Columbia Studios in California, where dialogue, music andsound effects were added to the film:

I had become so involved in each detail of the score that it seemed to me perhaps the most important partof the picture. I had to keep reminding myself that it really is the least important part, that a spoken line cov-ered by music is a lost line, and by that much a loss to the picture, while a bar of music completely obliter-ated by speech is only a bar of music lost, and not necessarily a loss to the picture. Over and over again Irepeated 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 “par-ticularized.” Sometimes the music would be turned off completely for seconds to allow a line to stand forthstark and bare — and then be turned on again. Sometimes the music, which had been planned as a com-position 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 ofthe score. Everyone tries to com-fort him. “You can always use it ina suite.” Cold comfort. It is good forthe picture, he repeats numbly tohimself: it is good for the picture.

Bernstein did go on to create the20-minute Symphonic Suite from Onthe Waterfront in 1955, and he con-ducted the Philharmonic in its NewYork premiere on May 12, 1960.

Bernstein’s brassy, percussive, synco-pated musical “violence” of the water-

front is contrasted by a woodwind motifin tender moments between Terry (Mar-lon Brando) and Edie (Eva Marie Saint).

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Restoration and Adaptation

When the Leonard Bernstein Office set out to make the full score of this magnificent film available for live per-formance, the first step was to determine what musical materials had been preserved. It was not a surpriseto discover that no orchestral score existed. Often, films of the period were conducted from a ”short score,“which may simply indicate ”brass” or “strings” without any more detail about what each instrument should beplaying — it’s essentially a sketch.Happily, The Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress includes Bernstein’s own archival ma-

terials from his work on the film. From these, I assembled a working document for the complete film. But thiswas just a starting point; most of the cues in the archival materials did not exactly match the movie. It’s typi-cal for a film to be edited after the score has already been recorded, and this can lead in turn to strange editswithin the music to make adjustments for new scene timings. Kazan also overrode some of Bernstein’schoices, eliminating music from some scenes to allow the dialogue to be experienced on its own terms.Once I had reconciled the short score to the actual film, I began work on restoring the orchestration. Both

the short score and Bernstein’s own concert work, Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront, were helpful ref-erences, but much of the score is omitted from the Suite, or appears in a different form than it does in the film,and so much of the orchestration required careful transcription from the film sound track itself.The next challenge was to incorporate the studio mix of the film into the re-constructed orchestration. With

recorded music, passages that are played loudly can be artificially lowered in volume, usually so as not tooverwhelm spoken dialogue. The result is music that “feels” loud without actually being loud. Unfortunately,in live performance, there is no volume knob. The orchestra is either playing loudly or it isn’t, and it’s not sosimple as asking them to play more quietly – this would change the character of the intended sound too much.We were fortunate to have the great luxury of a technical rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic in June,allowing me to road-test possible solutions. By reducing the ”density” of the orchestration — for example,using half the strings, or using three brass soloists instead of a section of 10 – I was able to maintain the ‘bigsound’ that Bernstein wanted for these passages, but without compromising Kazan’s authorial vision.

Finally, I added the detailed information thatthe conductor uses to keep the live orchestra insync. The film is not a partner in this. It starts,and then it plays until it stops, and it will not waitfor the orchestra. The conductor’s screen dis-plays a sequence of colored streamers to helpmake sure the orchestra is keeping in sync. Thedifferent streamer colors indicate significantbars, show when the orchestra must make slightup or down “rubato” adjustments in tempo, andon which beats, and where the music shifts to anew section or changes character. It has been enormously rewarding to delve so

deeply into Bernstein’s music for this film. Thepower of Kazan’s striking black and white im-agery and storytelling, and the performancesfrom Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, and therest of the powerhouse cast are brought to an-other level entirely by the passion and power ofBernstein’s music. It is an extraordinary film anda masterful score, unlike anything else in Bern-stein’s catalogue, and it is a privilege to haveplayed a role in bringing it to new audiences.

— Garth Edwin Sunderland, vice president for project development and senior music editor for The Leonard Bernstein Office

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Original poster, 1954

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sparingly but with terrific impact. On the Wa-terfrontwas 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 theMighty. “I am furious about the AcademyAwards,” the composer wrote to his personalsecretary, Helen Coates. “It is obviously poli-tics, and I don’t care, except that it would havejacked up my price for the next picture to dou-ble.” Indefensible in retrospect, this slight mayaccount for why On the Waterfront remainedBernstein’s one and only film score.

Instrumentation: two flutes (one doubling pic-colo) and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets (onedoubling bass clarinet) and E-flat clarinet, foursaxophones (soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone),two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns,three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani(two sets), accordion, three tuned drums, snaredrum, xylophone, marimba, bass drum, chimes,two tam-tams, triangle, vibraphone, suspendedcymbal, orchestra bells, piano and out-of-tuneupright piano, harp, and strings.

New York’s Changing Waterfront

The waterways of New York and New Jersey look very different today than they did in the early 1950s settingof On the Waterfront. Cargo ships and dockworkers have given way to riverside greenways, housing, and com-mercial developments, due in large part to major changes that came to the shipping industry with the adventof container transport starting in the late 1950s. Massive ships loaded with steel containers, each prepackedwith goods, are now unloaded by cranes, eliminating the need to handle pieces of cargo by hand, work thatemployed some 31,000 longshoremen at 100 area piers during the period of On the Waterfront. Piers along the Hudson River in

Manhattan were largely abandonedin favor of investment in berths at theports of Elizabeth and Newark, NewJersey, where containers can be un-loaded from ships directly onto thetrucks that can hit the connectinghighways to deliver goods to loca-tions around the country. In 2014membership in the local unions rep-resenting longshoremen and portworkers stood at around 5,000.

— The Editors

New York City longshoremen, ca. 1950

That New York Sound

The score for On the Waterfront became an instantclassic, a prototype of the urban “New York” soundthat has been much imitated by other composersfaced with similar settings. Asked to name what heconsidered Bernstein’s greatest achievement as acomposer, the late cellist and conductor MstislavRostropovich predictably cited Bernstein’s Medita-tions for Cello (from Mass), but quickly added:

I also think that without him the United Statescould not have existed musically. Because he is aportrait of United States music. His Suite from Onthe Waterfront I have conducted many, manytimes, and this music smells of the United States.But it is a good smell!

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