Memories of a Distant Summer
by Kenneth Schermerhorn
This photograph from the halcyon summer of 1955 is a rather watery image of surely one of my life's most thoroughly thrilling moments. There I was reentering the civilian world after four and one half years of the frustrating, nomadic regimentation of army life, suddenly finding myself in that bucolic haven of music called Tanglewood and swept into the exciting, awe-inspiring presence of the most gifted, capable, fascinating, diverse, scholarly, energetic, successful musician I will ever know. I am still pondering revelations that were exposed to me in that fleeting Festival instant.
Lenny, having just returned from Hollywood and the completion of work on the score for
On the Waterfront had accepted me as a student conductor and was at that time, among countless other things, full of the exciting notions and prospects of the imminent birth of
West Side Story. Although I had studied conducting here and there in Europe and the US, Lenny was my first real and certainly my most important conducting teacher and that summer we journeyed into a lot of unfamiliar and exciting musical territory. So somewhere between the architectonic wonders of the
Seventh Symphony of Bruckner and the savage sophistication of
Cool, it was one heck of a summer. The premier of
WSS took place on September 29, 1957, and I was briefly considered to be the conductor. That never happened, but now almost fifty years later I'm having my occasion and what a thrilling moment it is for me!
My experience conducting the music of
WSS until this production had been confined to the
Symphonic Dances, the overture and an occasional song. How unprepared I was to find myself in the midst of all this splendid melodic invention, the inspired cerebral activity of the motives and fragments, the organization, the musical focus of the drama, and the poignant beauty of the lines, not to mention the bathos and the blatant humor. For me the experience was not unlike devouring Macadamia nuts and all the restraint that such a delection involves. Each of these performances was marked by delicious memories of a distant summer and by the strange spectral presence of the composer, the man, the mentor, and the genius.
West Side Story persists after fifty years and thousands of performances from high schools to opera houses, to be a fresh, and thoroughly vital, statement. The musical materials remain both brilliant and beguiling, searing and soaring, the rhythms just as taut and engaging as they were in 1956. And what makes it all so durable and memorable is the magic of Leonard Bernstein.
