Leonard Bernstein – West Side Story

• Theme: Love, violence, tribalism, urban tragedy

• Musical Essence: A Broadway musical merging symphonic complexity with jazz, Latin rhythms, and popular idioms; retells Romeo and Juliet in the form of rival street gangs (Jets vs. Sharks); addresses racial tension, youthful desire, doomed love, and social violence; includes iconic songs like “Maria,” “Tonight,” “America,” “Somewhere”

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

From the first explosive chords of the prologue, West Side Story declares itself: modern myth, not in marble—but in pavement and neon, in sirens and syncopation. And Nietzsche, attuned to the cultural soul, would feel it instantly: This is tragedy reborn as choreography, aria reborn as slang.

What we witness is not the fall of kings or the wrath of gods—but the destruction of innocence by inherited hatred. The tribalism is real. The suffering is real. But the form—music that dances, lyrics that reach for poetry in broken grammar—elevates the rawness into aesthetic confrontation.

Nietzsche would ask: Is this decadent kitsch, or noble stylization?

He would answer: It is style in the face of dissolution. It is Dionysus in sneakers.

The love between Tony and Maria is not idealized. It is too urgent, too fragile, too doomed. Their desire is the last flowering of the Apollonian in a city ruled by Dionysian rage. But it is not the old Dionysus of wine and joy—it is the modern Dionysus of gangs, knives, turf wars. The passion does not transcend society. It is crushed by it.

And yet Bernstein does not give us only darkness. He gives us melody. "Maria", with its ascending motif, becomes a metaphysical ladder—not toward heaven, but toward meaning in the individual moment. For Nietzsche, this is everything. The name Maria becomes pure affirmation—not because it leads anywhere, but because it is beautiful in its saying.

“Let us become those we are—men who create themselves.”

Tony and Maria try. But the world around them has already decided. Tribal hatred, masculine pride, systemic poverty—these are the modern fates, and they do not need gods to kill lovers. They need only misunderstanding and knives.

The score itself is a Nietzschean marvel: high art that does not despise popular idiom. Latin jazz in “America,” lyrical duets in “Tonight,” street chant in “Cool”—all forged into a musical whole that refuses hierarchy. It is egalitarian, plural, hybrid—and Nietzsche would love this. No single truth. No single voice. Only a polyphonic culture grappling with itself.

And when the end comes—Tony shot, Maria alone—the music does not resolve. There is no celestial chord, no redemptive finale. Instead, the gangs carry the body, and the melody hangs unresolved in the air.

Nietzsche would nod. This is real tragedy: no reward, no purification. Just the clarity of what is—and the art that dared to name it beautifully.

“We must give style to our character,” he said, “a great and rare art!”

Bernstein gave style to urban suffering, to immigrant struggle, to forbidden love, without lying, without sentimentalizing. He gave America its own tragedy—not in ancient masks, but in alleyways and rooftop duets. And in doing so, he showed that even in a world stripped of myth, the aesthetic impulse remains: to love, to sing, to dance—if only for a moment—against the knife's edge of history.