A moving biopic of Leonard Bernstein, Maestro, took me back across the decades to West Side Story, a film I first saw over 50 years ago. His music left a vivid impression on me, even at that young age. The movement, the raw emotion was unlike anything I had experienced before. I did not have the words then to describe what I was feeling, but the effect was undeniable. That early brush with Bernstein, a conductor, composer, and cultural force who brought symphonic music into public life, changed the way I would forever engage with music, theatre, storytelling, and perhaps, in some small way, with the world itself.
It was Bernstein’s score that had lingered in memory all these years, those sweeping, syncopated rhythms and aching melodies that gave emotional depth to a story of love and violence, of youth and loss. A successful Broadway Musical in 1957 and adapted to a film in 1961, West Side Story turned into a cinematic triumph that redefined the genre of musical film. With a daring brilliance, the film transposes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet onto the persevering streets of mid-century New York. Instead of Capulets and Montagues, we have the Jets and the Sharks, the two rival gangs divided not by family but by race and immigration. It is the white working-class youth pitched against Puerto Rican newcomers, as love turns to rebellion and dance metamorphoses into defiance.
Bernstein’s score amalgamates classical composition with jazz, Latin rhythms, and street vernacular, a daring musical fusion that captures the disquiet of a generation. Songs such as Maria, Tonight, America, and Somewhere, more than melodies, are emotional and political sites, conjuring longing, division, hope, and despair in a symphony of pulsating music with all the contradictions that generate meaning rather than reach reconciliation.
What makes West Side Story endure is its ability to reflect on the fractures within society emerging out of racial prejudice, economic marginalisation, and the yearning for belonging. Its tragedy is not only confined to lovers torn by fate but also to entire communities locked in cycles of violence, misapprehension, and exclusion. The film, in that sense, was ahead of its time. Even today, it feels disconcertingly current in the racist politics of Trump and the hardcore right wing.
Powerful art
Looking back, I realise how deeply it exemplified Bernstein’s own view of art not as something that gives easy answers, but as something that opens up a space where thought itself becomes active. Even in my young days, I had sensed that I was watching something meant to move and disturb, not to reassure. That encounter stayed with me as a reminder that powerful art unsettles us, and in that disturbance, it begins to anchor us amid life’s turbulence.
My experience of West Side Story and Bernstein’s music is inseparable from the layers of history and identity that I have related to in my reading over the years of Edward Said’s eloquent books Musical Elaborations and Culture and Imperialism, where he reminds us that art is never simply entertainment, but a battleground where power, memory, and belonging intersect, as experienced in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, a compelling reading of opera as a cultural form deeply enmeshed in imperial ideologies and historical power relations. Like Said, Bernstein does not merely appreciate opera or the musical genre as an aesthetic experience; instead, he interrogates how it becomes a site of political meaning, especially in the age of racist politics.
Bernstein’s score captures this tension vibrantly in a soundscape of fractured communities and inharmonious worlds, much like the diasporic and marginalised lives Said often wrote about. Listening to Bernstein now, I feel more than just the drama of a love story. I feel the echoes of displacement and the nostalgia for a home that may never fully exist. His music is a personal dialogue for me, an amplification on the fissures and hopes that shape our lives, and a testament to art’s power to divulge and struggle against the multifaceted realities of identity and conflict.
In retrospect after more than half a century, West Side Story taught me a lesson that no textbook ever could, a lesson that art does not simply reflect life, it catechises it, breaks it open, uncovers its fault lines. Bernstein once said, “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them. And these answers really come out of contradictions, out of counterpoints, out of tensions.” West Side Story is indeed an impeccable quintessence of that principle with its bequest lying not just in its novelty, but also in its dogged honesty, its refusal to simplify or comfort, and its persistence on the emotional and political complexity of being human.
Published – August 31, 2025 04:24 am IST