Composers › Leonard Bernstein › Programme note
Fancy Free
Gerald Larner wrote 2 versions of differing length — choose one below.
Three Sailors –
Scene at the Bar –
Two Girls –
Pas de deux
Competition Scene –
Dance Variations: Galop – Waltz – Danzón
Finale
Leonard Bernstein’s first stage work, Fancy Free was also the first in a series of collaborations with Jerome Robbins which culminated, by way of On the Town and Fasmile, in West Side Story 13 years later. In fact, Fancy Free was Robbins’s idea. He had just become a choreographer with the American Ballet Theater and was eager to find a composer for a ballet to be based on a distinctively American scenario about sailors on shore leave in New York. He turned to an unknown musician of much the same age as himself – Robbins and Bernstein were both in their mid-twenties – who willingly took on the project, getting to work on it while the choreographer was on tour with the ballet company and sending him a piano recording of each piece as he wrote it.
The first performance of Fancy Free at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in April 1944, with Bernstein conducting and Robbins dancing the lead role to his own choreography, was a sensation. Its phenomenal success – it was performed no fewer than 160 times in just a year – was attributable not least to a score which so brilliantly reflects the popular idiom of the day while animating it with a rare vitality. The ballet (though not usually the concert version) sets the scene with a jukebox version of a blues song called “Big Stuff.” The first notes of the orchestral score are four noisy rimshots on the snare drum followed by a vigorously syncopated tune on the brass, signalling the entry of the Three Sailors. In various transformations, including particularly attractive passages for piano, it sustains the whole of the first section until it dies out on low woodwind.
Scene at the Bar, which follows without a break, begins quietly with two clarinets suggesting the place is as empty as Aaron Copland’s open spaces and only a subdued piano offering a sign of dance-band life. With the entry of Two Girls to music marked “fast and hot” the bar, like the sailor’s expectations, comes to life. Finally, after a short bump-and-grind episode, even the cool pianist shares the excitement. The Pas de deux is a distorted tango version of the “Big Stuff” blues tune, first heard on flute and muted trombones although, after a Stravinskyan purely rhythmic intervention, it passes to most areas of the orchestra.
The first clear break in the score comes after the Pas de Deux. In the following Competition Scene the three sailors vie for the attention of the two girls, calling on the vigorously syncopated material associated with them earlier, at first in a friendly spirit but then with increasingly bitter rivalry. The answer to the problem is a dance contest. The Dance Variations begin with highly percussive Galop in which the first of the sailors “aims to appeal,“ according to Bernstein, “with a kind of acrobatic, vaudeville showiness.” The second is a Waltz of “mock gentility” slipping ingenious from 3/4 to 3/8 and 4/4 on an almost bar-by-bar basis and, in the middle section, “abruptly shifting to bumps and dance-hall devices” in a march-like 4/4. The Danzón is “modelled on the Cuban pattern with seductive Latin-American gestures, grotesquely parodied.” The term “variation” is used in the ballet sense but the music of the three dances is also in variation form, the thematic basis being the first three notes of the Waltz.
In the Finale the contest proves to have been such a success with the girls that they join in the dancing but not – as the sailors’ music becomes ever more boisterous and even violent – for long. They depart and, as the solitarily tinkling piano and then two lonely flutes indicate, leave the bar as empty as it was in Scene at the Bar. Outside in the street another girl walks past to a seductive piano solo and the sailors, undeterred by their experience, follow in hot pursuit.
Although the score of Fancy Free betrays the influence of several of the young composer’s heroes – not only Copland and Stravinsky but also Blitzstein and Weill – it also offers overwhelming evidence of a prodigious creative energy.
Gerald Larner © 2009
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Fancy Free/w595/n.rtf”
Three Sailors –
Scene at the Bar –
Two Girls –
Pas de deux
Competition Scene –
Dance Variations: Galop – Waltz – Danzón
Finale
Leonard Bernstein’s first stage work, Fancy Free was also the first in a series of collaborations with Jerome Robbins which culminated, by way of On the Town and Fasmile, in West Side Story 13 years later. In fact, Fancy Free was Robbins’s idea. He had just become a choreographer with the American Ballet Theater and was eager to find a composer for a ballet to be based on a distinctively American scenario about sailors on shore leave in New York. He turned to an unknown musician of much the same age as himself – Robbins and Bernstein were both in their mid-twenties – who took on the project, getting to work on it while the choreographer was on tour with the ballet company and sending him a piano recording of each piece as he wrote it.
The first performance of Fancy Free at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in April 1944, with Bernstein conducting and Robbins dancing the lead role to his own choreography, was a sensation. Its phenomenal success – it was performed no fewer than 160 times in just a year – was attributable not least to a score which so brilliantly reflects the popular idiom of the day while animating it with a rare vitality. The ballet (though not usually the concert suite) sets the scene with a jukebox version of a blues song called “Big Stuff.” The first notes of the orchestral score are four noisy rimshots on the snare drum followed by a vigorously syncopated tune on the brass, signalling the entry of the Three Sailors. In various transformations, including particularly attractive passages for piano, it sustains the whole of the first section until it dies out on low woodwind.
Scene at the Bar, which follows without a break, begins quietly with two clarinets suggesting the place is as empty as Aaron Copland’s open spaces and only a subdued piano offering a sign of dance-band life. With the entry of Two Girls to music marked “fast and hot” the bar, like the sailor’s expectations, comes to life. Finally, after a short bump-and-grind episode, even the cool pianist shares the excitement. The Pas de deux is a distorted tango version of the “Big Stuff” blues tune, first heard on flute and muted trombones although, after a Stravinskyan purely rhythmic intervention, it passes to most areas of the orchestra.
The first clear break in the score comes after the Pas de Deux. In the following Competition Scene the three sailors vie for the attention of the two girls, calling on the vigorously syncopated material associated with them earlier, at first in a friendly spirit but then with increasing enmity. The answer to the problem is a dance contest. The Dance Variations begin with highly percussive Galop in which the first of the sailors “aims to appeal,“ according to Bernstein, “with a kind of acrobatic, vaudeville showiness.” The second is a Waltz of “mock gentility” slipping ingenious from 3/4 to 3/8 and 4/4 on an almost bar-by-bar basis and, in the middle section, “abruptly shifting to bumps and dance-hall devices” in a march-like 4/4. The Danzón is “modelled on the Cuban pattern with seductive Latin-American gestures, grotesquely parodied.” The term “variation” is used in the ballet sense but the music of the three dances is also in variation form, the thematic basis being the first three notes of the Waltz.
In the Finale the contest proves to have been such a success with the girls that they join in the dancing but not – as the sailors’ music becomes ever more boisterous and even violent – for long. They depart and, as the solitary piano and then two lonely flutes indicate, leave the bar as empty as it was in Scene at the Bar. Outside in the street another girl walks past to a seductive piano solo and the sailors, undeterred by their experience, follow in hot pursuit.
Although the score of Fancy Free betrays the influence of several of Bernstein’s composers heroes – not only Copland and Stravinsky but also Blitzstein and Weill –
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Fancy Free.rtf”