…Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. 

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes 

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life. 

(Prologue,   Romeo and Juliet,   William Shakespeare) 

While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

(Genesis 4:8) 

When Remus knew of the deceit, he was enraged,⁠ and…smitten, by Romulus himself…fell dead there. 

(The Life of Romulus,  10.1, Plutarch)

In the strident, divided and divisive year of 2025, the perpetually recurring and moving drama of two young lovers, holding on to each other across an antagonistic cultural chasm, never loses its power to move us. Dressed in new garb, it lives on as West Side Story. 

When did brothers first murder? Apparently since the very beginning. Why are they (we) still slaughtering each other? Shakespeare, along with the musical’s extraordinary artistic team of composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Jerome Robbins, playwright Arthur Laurents and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, pose that question with an object lesson in its tragic consequences. 

There are hundreds of works drawn from Shakespeare’s plays. Romeo and Juliet was to become a central myth-like theme for a large part of 19^th-century (particularly Italian) opera. A young man and a young woman, desirous of being together, must survive obstacles in an environment that is unfriendly at best, dangerous at worst. The story is about those obstacles and the success or failure of their efforts. West Side Story is just one in a long series of stage works that, stripped down to their core, follow that formula. 

As one who loves opera, loves Shakespeare and loves the music and titanic artistic personality of Leonard Bernstein, it is easy for me to sing the praises of this Broadway musical, destined to become a classic within half a century of its creation. 

Does it belong in an opera house? I say yes, absolutely, and everywhere else. Is it dated? Yes and no, the way almost all classics are. Is the story’s geographic location essential? No more or less than other classics. Is it relevant today? Totally. 

American musical theater—the Broadway musical—is a direct outgrowth of European operatic culture. Vocal virtuosity was always at the root of the art form, but it also developed around varying notions of theater and drama. In the 19th century, following leads from the previous century (Mozart in particular), contemporary tastes in opera resulted in a fork in the road that led to two parallel pathways. 

The greatest moments of musical and vocal expression, the most intense emotions and the highest moments of drama, were conveyed through a combination of intensely expressive singing and, to varying degrees, the presence if not full participation of the orchestra. These climatic moments were connected by lower intensity musical delivery of text that propelled the plot, called "recitative.” It's a form of singing that’s driven by the text, with the music totally secondary, accompanied by a keyboard instrument or at times with the string section or even the entirety of the orchestra. 

But some composers and producers preferred to eliminate the recitative and offer spoken dialogue instead as the connective tissue. Consequently, an alternative developed, usually considered more “popular” and clearly meant to be spoken in the language of the country. This form did not enjoy much use in Italy, but it did in the German-speaking countries and in France.

It was known as the opéra comique in France (Carmen, in its original form, is probably the greatest example) and the Singspiel in German-speaking countries, where its most famous examples are Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio and The Magic Flute. Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz and Oberon are 19th-century examples. This form would eventually transform into operetta, which became extremely popular, particularly in Vienna. The kings of Viennese operetta were Johann Strauss, Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán, while Jacques Offenbach was the foremost operetta composer in Paris. The richly witty works of Gilbert and Sullivan thrived in England and were successfully imported to the United States. 

As the American musical theater developed, its roots can be clearly traced to operetta. Is there an inherent dissonance in performing a musical on an operatic stage that also presents Die Fledermaus, The Merry Widow, La Vie Parisienne, La Belle Hélène or Donizetti’s opéra comique The Daughter of the Regiment? My answer is no. Therefore, why not West Side Story? Except for habit or preference, in Vienna you could go to the Staatsoper or the Volksoper, in Paris the Palais Garnier or the Opéra Comique, and in old New York you could go to Broadway or stop in at 1411 Broadway, the address of the (pre-Lincoln Center) Metropolitan Opera House. 

Speaking of that, is there not a poignant irony in the fact that the neighborhood where West Side Story takes place was razed and is now the site of Lincoln Center? In 1957, two years before the groundbreaking ceremony, the musical opened first in Washington D.C. and then in New York, where it ran for 732 performances. By the time the show closed, the demolition of the “old” neighborhood was underway. I can still visualize the enormous holes in the ground that were to become the first Philharmonic Hall (1962), the New York State Theater (1964), the Library of the Performing Arts (1965) and the new Metropolitan Opera House (1966). Lincoln Center would transform the entire West Side of Manhattan, as was part of the intention of its planners. 

But the character of that neighborhood, and its human drama, had already been captured and immortalized through this extraordinary theatrical masterpiece.

I take the liberty here of making a detour into my own story and why this work is so special to me. On reflection, I calculate that perhaps less than ten percent of the music that I perform reflects on my own experience as an American. That percentage drops to less than one percent if applied to music from and about New York City.

For me—born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, having grown up in Queens but destined to consider the West Side my home, both literally and artistically—there is no other work like West Side Story. 

Having heard it at home in the early era of long-playing records, I wore the recording through and absorbed it all by osmosis before I had even had my first piano lessons. I was taken to see the 1961 movie under the proper supervision of my mother, my newly acquired piano teacher and my older siblings. Both wide-eyed and with ears burning, I experienced the full theatrical and shocking (especially to my teacher) power of the drama.

By the time I entered the High School of Music & Art, all of us had fully digested it. We took the subway every day to and from school, traveling through neighborhoods that would now be considered reminiscent of those we see on stage and screen. We might not have thought about West Side Story   a lot then, as by now our focus was Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Brahms and Schumann (for starters), but it was our music. 

“An out and out plea for racial tolerance” is scribbled in Bernstein’s hand on the first page of his copy of Shakespeare’s original. And that racial tolerance was also our story as young New Yorkers. We were all growing up in the cauldron of the proverbial “melting pot” where we, like metals, were to be melted down until we were refashioned into bona fide Americans. The majority of us were children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants. We were all mixed into the same classes, young boys and girls in love with music and art (the name of our high school): white, African American, Latino and Asian. And "white” was not monolithic, divided (sometimes confrontationally) into Catholic, Protestant and Jewish neighborhoods. Conversations were freely strewn with insults and racial epithets. But they were also replete with ethnic humor and less malignant forms of the racial divide. Humor was part of how we dealt with those racial and religious dynamics that defined us, in this massive port that had welcomed the “tired, poor, huddled masses” into a city of immigrants. 

We all grew up with knowledge and often firsthand experience of racism and its attendant tension. 

So, the Jets and Sharks were not remote for us. We had all seen gangs and the so-called “slums” as they are depicted in West Side Story. And yet we New Yorkers came together, and found ourselves, despite or because of the racial mix. Tony and Maria were symbols of the spirit in which we believed and lived. I know of no other musical work, opera or musical, symphony or sonata, that captures the spirit and memorializes New York City so well.

It is interesting to note West Side Story owes its first inspiration to Jerome Robbins, who wanted to choreograph the story. The idea was hatched as a work to be danced. (Just as the first French operas were born of the ballet under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of Louis XIV.) Leonard Bernstein had already emerged as a major force in American music, making a strong impression with the ballet Fancy Free and the musical On the Town in 1944, and his great years were yet to come.  

The new work was to be entitled East Side Story and the conflicting antagonistic families of Shakespeare were to be Catholics and Jews. Laurents (né Levine), Robbins (né Rabinowitz), Bernstein and the somewhat younger Sondheim were all Jewish. Robbins had grown up on the Upper East Side. Perhaps it started there. They were all decidedly left wing, and Bernstein and Robbins in particular came under intense pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee who, amongst other pressure, threatened to expose their homosexuality. 

The project didn’t progress until a meeting exactly 70 years ago (August 25 to be precise) in Beverly Hills. It was at this time, that the conflict changed to be between two teenage gangs, one white, called the Jets, already “arrived” and therefore with a sense of entitlement. The antagonistic gang, the Sharks, were more newly arrived Puerto Ricans. There was a great migration from Puerto Rico in the 1940s that intensified after World War II, so it was probably very much on the mind of the authors. In actuality, the Puerto Rican community was concentrated in East Harlem (where Robbins had grown up), the Lower East Side and the South Bronx, nowhere near the West Side of Manhattan. 

Bernardo (a Shark) calls Tony (a Jet) a “Polack,” a politically incorrect, disparaging term in common usage for anybody descended from Poland or, more broadly and mistakenly, Ukraine and Lithuania. It sometimes was also an antisemitic code word. Perhaps this is a leftover of the original Catholic versus Jewish 1949 plan, now with Catholic Puerto Ricans and Jewish “Polacks.”

Probably the greatest gain in the new scenario is the gift it gave to Leonard Bernstein as a vehicle for the composer to make extensive use of the Latin American spirit and dance rhythms. Combining those with jazz and his classically trained compositional technique, he had a much broader palette of color with which to begin. Using occasional citations, whether consciously or not, from Wagner (the “redemption through love” motif from the Ring) and Debussy (Mélisande’s death), he infused it all with his own brand of rhythmic vitality. 

He captured the incessant energy of New York, the “city that never sleeps,” with its violence, sensuality, danger, loneliness and excitement, the rumble of the subway, the clanking of iron construction, the roar of elevated trains overhead, the tinnitus of traffic, and the wail of police whistles and ambulance sirens. As for satiric humor, what could top Anita and her Puerto Rican girlfriends’ “I like to be in America” and the raw hoodlum humor directed at Officer Krupke?

Bernstein and company have updated a classic tale of idealistic love, attempting to “somehow, somewhere, sometime" find a place to live their love, in an overtly hostile and troubled world. That love, willing to break through racial barriers and cultural taboos, continues to inspire. 

In a world continuously endangered by tribalism, rift with conflict, Bernstein envisioned redemption and solace in love, urging us to defy the example of Cain and Romulus and choose love over hate, compassion over violence. 

Copyright © 2025, James Conlon

For further thoughts read:  "Is Opera Shakespearean? Or Shakespeare Operatic?