The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [119]
Meanwhile, I was going to Hebrew school after regular school; and the temple we belonged to [Temple Mishkan Tefila] also introduced me to live music. There was an organ, a sweet-voiced cantor and a choir led by a fantastic man named Professor Solomon Braslavsky from Vienna, who composed liturgical compositions that were so grand and oratorio-like—very much influenced by Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and even Mahler. And I used to weep just listening to the choir, cantor and organ thundering out—it was a big influence on me. I realized, many years later, that the “gang call”—the way the Jets signal to each other—in West Side Story was really like the call of the shofar that I used to hear blown in temple on Rosh Hashanah.
‘West Side Story’ is your most famous and successful work. Did you have a sense that it would be so popular when you composed it?
Not at all. In fact, everybody told us that the show was an impossible project. Steve Sondheim [who wrote the lyrics] and I auditioned it like crazy, playing piano four-hands to convey a quintet or the twelve-tone “Cool” fugue. But no one, we were told, was going to be able to sing augmented fourths—as with “Ma-ri-a” (C to F-sharp). Also, they said the score was too “rangy” for pop music: “Tonight, Tonight”—it went all over the place. Besides, who wanted to see a show in which the first-act curtain comes down on two dead bodies lying on the stage? “That’s not a Broadway musical comedy.”
And then we had the really tough problem of casting it, because the characters had to be able not only to sing but to dance and act and be taken for teenagers. Ultimately, some members of the cast were teenagers, some were twenty-one, some were thirty but looked sixteen. Some were wonderful singers but couldn’t dance very well or vice versa. And if they could do both, they couldn’t act.
Somehow it worked out. And it even saved Columbia Records financially—which at the outset didn’t want to invest in or record it. Remember: It was a bad time for popular music. Bebop’s appeal was limited and was practically over, and there was mostly a lot of smarmy ballads sung by people like Johnny Mathis.
Through your Young People’s Concerts, television specials, books, lectures and preconcert chats, you’ve been giving people an education for more than forty years. You yourself once called teaching probably the “noblest . . . most unselfish . . . most honorable” profession in the world. And you once referred to “this old quasi-rabbinical instinct” you had for “teaching and explaining.” It’s said that in traditional Jewish society, a child, when he was six or seven years old, was carried to the schoolroom for the first time by a rabbi, where he received a clean slate on which the letters of the Hebrew alphabet had been written in honey. Licking off the slate while reciting the name of each letter, the child was thus made to think of his studies as sweet and desirable.
Though I can’t prove it, deep in my heart I know that every person is born with the love of learning. Without exception. Every infant studies its toes and fingers; and a child’s discovery of his or her voice is one of the most extraordinary of life’s moments. I’ve suggested that there must be proto-syllables existing at the beginnings of all languages—like ma (or some variant of it), which, in almost every tongue, means “mother”—mater, madre, mutter, mat, Ima, shi-ma, mama. Imagine an infant lying in its cradle, purring and murmuring mmm to itself . . . and suddenly it gets hungry. So it opens its mouth for the nipple and out comes mmaa-aa! . . . and thus it learns to associate that syllable with the breast and the pleasure of being fed. Madre and mar [“mother” and “sea”] are almost the same word in Spanish; and in French, mère and mer are near homonyms. The amniotic sea is where you spend your first nine months—that great ocean in which you don’t have to breathe or do anything.