<pre_script>
The idea for this post has been bubbling away on the back-burner for some time, but something struck me today – or more probably the day before yesterday by the time I hit Publish – that has brought it to the fore. And "Something" is an appropriate choice of words, as it relates to the song Something's Coming at the beginning of West Side Story; specifically the introductory words, when Tony's still stacking bottles of pop ...
Could be,
Who knows?
... before deciding to sing. Each ...<inline_pps>Correction: only the second – I misremembered.</inline_pps>of these lines includes a tritone [HD 2022: three whole tones]....
[And] In the later song Maria (and Maria transpires to be that something) the same tritone is there, but spelt differently (it's a rising diminished fifth this time, rather than a falling augmented fourth). Bernstein is telling the audience something, and it's only taken me sixty-odd years ...<autobiographical_note>
The film (which the older of my brothers saw in the West End) premiered in 1961, but I heard the original Broadway cast recording in the late '50s.
</autobiographical_note>...to notice it. I wrote "later song Maria", though Something‘s Coming was an afterthought (as explained here), so Bernstein knew de antemano as they say in Spanish...,
<tangent>
And there's another thing that I've no time to pursue: calques, or "loan translations". Which came first, de antemano or beforehand? ante = before, and mano = hand (where those "=" signs have a fairly loose sense of equivalence).
</tangent>...what the "Something" was, and what it would lead to....
</pre_script>
And this is no accident. It's not only in the introduction to "Something's Coming"; it's the first interval in the verse ("It's only just...") and the last interval in the song resolves it to a perfect fourth ("Something great is coming").
On television, some time in the festive miasma (just before Christmas, I think) I saw West Side Story - The Making of a Classic, which mentioned tritones and pointed out that they appeared all over the place in Bernstein's score – in the opening whistle (that's what the programme said, although it doesn't involve all three notes, just the 2nd and 3rd) and in "Cool": "Boy, boy..."
"Pshaw!", I sneered to myself. "I spotted that years ago". But not so fast: the programme was a repeat, first aired on Boxing Day 2016 (well, the Feast of St Stephen, though like 26 December 2021 it was probably some nondescript Bank Holiday); and I may have seen it then (though if I had I would have expected to remember one of the presenters, Bruno Tonioli, who I associate with neither music nor the history of musical theatre (though maybe there are hidden depths there). So my "spotting" of tritones may not have been original (although, even so, the link between "Something's Coming" and "Maria" was).
The occasion for the re-showing of the Making of... programme was the fiftieth anniversary of the original film and the (hardly coincidental, I imagine) release of the Spielberg remake – which I saw at the weekend.
<progress_indicator>
Aha... Llegando al grano, as they say in Spain (="Arriving at the grain", in other words "Getting to the point".
</progress_indicator>
I had mixed feelings; the obvious first question is "Why? Why try to improve on a masterpiece?" That's an easy one: bums on seats; money. And to have Pop's widow (a sprightly young Rita Moreno, at a mere 90) singing "Somewhere"? What would they do? Change the words? It's addressed by a lover to a lover.
The opening seemed to confirm my fears. The opening whistle, as I said, has a tritone ...
<parenthesis>
I wrote above "three whole tones" (unsurprisingly: we all know what tri- means). But I find it more helpful to think of it as six semi-tones. The tritone is either an augmented fourth (a semi-tone more than a perfect fourth, e.g. F -B) or a diminished fifth (a semi-tone less than a perfect fifth, e.g. B-F).
</parenthesis>
...between the 2nd and 3rd notes; that is, according to Bernstein's score it has. But the whistler in the 2021 recording overshoots by more than a quarter-tone:
But things got better after that. The CGI available to Spielberg meant that the slum clearances were more credible, which supported a general stiffening up of what was in 1961, a fairly flimsy plot. And the reality of the racial tensions (supported by racially-sympathetic casting) was brought further to life in the a capella song sung by the Sharks when Lieutenant Schrank tells Bernardo to leave. He says vamo' to his followers, but his defiance is clear; in the words of their song, Despierta de ese sueño Qu'es tiempo de luchar.... Vamonos... (meaning, roughly, "Wake up; stop dreaming. It's time to fight.... Let's go...").
<inline_ps>
The soundtrack recording lists the Sharks' defiant a capella chant as La Borinqueña, which surprised me at first for two reasons:
- the lyrics include the word "Borinqueño" (helpfully glossed by Wikipedia in their English translation as "boricua")
- the words were not – at first sight – those of La Borinqueña (the national anthem...
<hang_on query_term="national">
Well yes, it is, in certain contexts – the Olympics, for example: see this. for some background
</hang_on>...of Puerto Rico). But in the end it all made sense: a Borinqueño is an inhabitant of Puerto Rico, and the word (with the -o ending) does figure in La Borinqueña. And the words sung by the Jets are not the namby-pamby "hello trees, hello clouds" politically correct words written by Manuel Fernández Juncos and adopted in 1903 (which read like a particularly starry-eyed travel brochure):
- The land of Borinquén
- where I was born
- is a flowery garden
- of magical beauty.
- A constantly clear sky
- serves as its canopy.
- And placid lullabies are sung
- by the waves at its feet.
...etc. Those "placid lullabies" are a far cry from 'Wake up; stop dreaming. It's time to fight". Those words are taken from what were, as Wikipedia says, the Original 1868 revolutionary lyrics (dating from a time when Fernández Juncos was still a babe in arms)</inline_ps>
The back-story is more credible too, especially Tony's as a once-violent nearly homicidal but now reformed ex-juvenile delinquent. And even "Somewhere" works, as the camera shows a photo of Valentina (Rita Moreno) and Pop on their wedding day; so that it becomes a statement of hope in a mixed-race marriage, and in a multi-racial saociety in general).
And Tony as a barely-competent deus ex machina ("I've fixed it. It'll only be a fist-fight, one on one") was a bit hard to swallow in the original. Showing his abortive attempt at peace-making (and moving "Cool" to before the rumble) worked well (although bits of the original dialogue playing in the background [my mental background, that is] – "I wanna get even" etc. – were a bit distracting).
To balance the technical advantages that Spielberg had, he had to think aabout anachronisms (whereas fifty years ago that's just the way things were). There was plenty of the low-hanging fruit (like "daddyo" and "copacetic"); but one linguistic slip that stood out for me was in the scene where the Jets are getting tooled up for the rumble. One of the (unwilling, but... you know...OK if you twist my arm) adults uses the term "mutual assured destruction" – a phrase not coined until 1962 (so at least a year after the original film was in the can, and several years after the Broadway show):
The term "mutual assured destruction", commonly abbreviated "MAD", was coined by Donald Brennan, a strategist working ... in 1962.
Source
Of course, a new word or phrase is often in the zeitgeist for a year or two before it's first recorded in print, but in a case like this I think Wikipedia is probably reliable: the term simply wasn't around until Brennan coined it "ironically, to argue that holding weapons capable of destroying society was irrational" (i.e. millions of people, not just a handful of punks).
Altogether, though, I thought the Spielberg version was enjoyable and worth seeing.
Meanwhile, back at the Real World, I have a translation to submit.
b
Update: 2022.01.07.12:50 – Added <inline_ps />
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