Bernstein and Robbins.

Jerome Robbins Born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz October 11, 1918 Manhattan, New York City, U.S. Died July 29, 1998 (aged 79) Manhattan, New York City, U.S. Occupation Theater producer, director, dancer, choreographer Years active 1937–1998 Awards Full list Jerome Robbins (October 11, 1918 – July 29, 1998) was an American choreographer, director, dancer, and theater producer who worked in classical ballet, on stage, film, and television. Among his numerous stage productions were On the Town, Peter Pan, High Button Shoes, The King and I, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof. Robbins was a five-time Tony Award-winner and a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. He received two Academy Awards, including the 1961 Academy Award for Best Director with Robert Wise for West Side Story. A documentary about Robbins‘ life and work, Something to Dance About, featuring excerpts from his journals, archival performance and rehearsal footage, and interviews with Robbins and his colleagues, premiered on PBS in 2009 and won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award the same year. Early life Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz in the Jewish Maternity Hospital at 270 East Broadway on Manhattan's Lower East Side – a neighborhood populated by many immigrants. He was the son of Lena (Rips) and Harry Rabinowitz. The Rabinowitz family lived in a large apartment house at 51 East 97th Street at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue. Known as "Jerry" to those close to him, Robbins was given the middle name Wilson reflecting his parents' patriotic enthusiasm for the then-president, Woodrow Wilson. In the early 1920s, the Rabinowitz family moved to Weehawken, New Jersey. His father and uncle opened the Comfort Corset Company in Union City. The family had many show business connections, including vaudeville performers and theater owners. In the 1940s, their name was legally changed to Robbins. Robbins began studying modern dance in high school with Alys [CK] Bentley, who encouraged her pupils to improvise steps to music. Said Robbins later: "What gave me immediately was the absolute freedom to make up my own dances without inhibition or doubts." After graduation, he went to study chemistry at New York University (NYU) but dropped out after a year for financial reasons, and to pursue dance full-time. He joined the company of Senya Gluck Sandor, a leading exponent of expressionistic modern dance; it was Sandor who recommended that he change his name to Robbins. Sandor also encouraged him to take ballet, which he did with Ella Daganova; in addition, he studied Spanish dancing with Helen Veola; Asian dance with Yeichi Nimura; and dance composition with Bessie Schonberg. While a member of Sandor's company Robbins made his stage debut with the Yiddish Art Theater, in a small role in [The Brothers Ashkenazi]. Career 1930s and 40s Robbins in Three Virgins and a Devil, 1941 In 1937 Robbins made the first of many appearances as a dancer at Camp Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos known for its weekly Broadway-style revues; he also began dancing in the choruses of such Broadway shows as Great Lady and Keep Off the Grass, both choreographed by George Balanchine. Robbins had also begun creating dances for Tamiment's Revues, some comic (featuring the talents of Imogene Coca and Carol Channing), and some dramatic, topical, and controversial. One such dance, later also performed in New York City at the 92nd Street Y, was Strange Fruit, set to the song performed by Billie Holiday. In 1940, Robbins joined Ballet Theatre (later known as American Ballet Theatre). From 1941 through 1944, Robbins was a soloist with the company, gaining notice for his Hermes in Helen of Troy, the title role in Petrouchka, the Youth in Agnes de Mille's Three Virgins and a Devil, and Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet; and coming under the influence of the choreographers Michel Fokine, Antony Tudor, and George Balanchine. Robbins created and performed in Fancy-Free, a ballet about sailors on liberty, at the Metropolitan Opera as part of the Ballet Theatre season in 1944. One of Fancy-Free's inspirations was Paul Cadmus' 1934 painting The Fleet's In! However, Robbins's scenario was more lighthearted than the painting. Robbins said in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor: "After seeing...Fleet's In, which I inwardly rejected though it gave me the idea of doing the ballet, I watched sailors, and girls, too, all over town." Robbins commissioned a score for the ballet from the then-unknown Leonard Bernstein and enlisted Oliver Smith as a set designer. With Fancy-Free, Robbins created a dance that integrated classic ballet, 1940s social dancing, and a screwball plotline. Later that year, Robbins conceived and choreographed On the Town (1944), a musical partly inspired by Fancy-Free, which effectively launched his Broadway career. Bernstein wrote the music and Smith designed the sets. The book and lyrics were by a team that Robbins would work with again, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and the director was the Broadway legend, George Abbott. Because Robbins, as a choreographer, insisted that his chorus reflect the racial diversity of a New York City crowd, On the Town broke the color bar on Broadway for the first time. Robbins' next musical was the jazz age fable Billion Dollar Baby (1945), and during rehearsals, for the show, an incident happened that became a part of Robbins – and Broadway – lore: the choreographer, preoccupied giving directions to the dancers, backed up onstage until he fell into the orchestra pit. Two years later, he received plaudits for his humorous Mack Sennett ballet in High Button Shoes (1947) and won his first Tony Award for choreography. That same year, Robbins would become one of the first members of New York's newly formed Actors Studio, attending classes held by founding member Robert Lewis three times a week, alongside classmates such as Marlon Brando, Maureen Stapleton, Montgomery Clift, Herbert Berghof, Sidney Lumet, and about 20 others. In 1948 he added another credit to his resume, becoming co-director as well as choreographer for Look Ma, I'm Dancin'!; and the year after that teamed with Irving Berlin to choreograph Miss Liberty. While he was forging a career on Broadway, Robbins continued to work in ballet, creating a string of inventive and stylistically diverse works including Interplay, to a score by Morton Gould, and Facsimile, to music by Leonard Bernstein, a ballet that was banned in Boston [CK]. In 1949 Robbins left Ballet Theatre to join George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein's newly formed New York City Ballet as Associate Artistic Director. Soon after that, he choreographed The Guests, a ballet about intolerance.

The future Renaissance man of American music was born in Lawrence, Mass., on Aug. 25, 1918, the son of Samuel and Jennie Resnick Bernstein. His father, a beauty-supplies jobber who had come to the United States from Russia as a boy, wanted Leonard to take over the business when he grew up. For many years the father resisted his son's intention to be a musician. The stories of how he discovered music became encrusted with legend over the years, but all sources agree he was a prodigy. Mr. Bernstein's own version was that when he was 10 years old his Aunt Clara, who was in the middle of divorce proceedings, sent her upright piano to the Bernstein home to be stored. The child looked at it, hit the keys and cried: ''Ma, I want lessons!'' Until he was 16, by his own testimony, he had never heard a live symphony orchestra, a late start for any musician, let alone a future musical director of the Philharmonic. Virgil Thomson, while music critic of The New York Herald Tribune in the 1940's, commented on this: ''Whether Bernstein will become in time a traditional conductor or a highly personal one is not easy to prophesy. He is a consecrated character, and his culture is considerable. It might just come about, though, that, having to learn the classic repertory the hard way, which is to say after 15, he would throw his cultural beginnings away and build toward success on a sheer talent for animation and personal projection. I must say he worries us all a little bit.'' These themes - the concern over Mr. Bernstein's ''talent for animation'' and over his penchant for ''personal projection'' - were to haunt the musician through much of his career. Economy of Motion Not His Virtue As for ''animation,'' that theme tended to dominate much of the criticism of Mr. Bernstein as a conductor, particularly in his youthful days. Although he studied conducting in Philadelphia at the Curtis Institute with Fritz Reiner, whose precise but tiny beat was a trademark of his work, Mr. Bernstein's own exuberant podium style seemed modeled more on that of Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony's music director. The neophyte maestro churned his arms about in accordance with some inner message, largely ignoring the clear semaphoric techniques described in textbooks. Often, in moments of excitement, he would leave the podium entirely, rising like a rocket, arms flung aloft in indication of triumphal climax. So animated, in fact, was Mr. Bernstein's conducting style at this point in his career that it could cause problems. At his first rehearsal for a guest appearance with the St. Louis Symphony, his initial downbeat so startled the musicians that they simply looked in amazement and made no sound. Like another prodigally gifted American artist, George Gershwin, Mr. Bernstein divided his affections between the ''serious'' European tradition of concert music and the ''popular'' American brand. Like Gershwin, he was at home in jazz, boogie-woogie and the cliches of Tin Pan Alley, but he far outstripped his predecessor in general musical culture. In many aspects of his life and career, Mr. Bernstein was an embracer of diversity. The son of Jewish immigrants, he retained a lifelong respect for Hebrew and Jewish culture. His ''Jeremiah'' and ''Kaddish'' symphonies and several other works were founded on the Old Testament. But he also acquired a deep respect for Roman Catholicism, which was reflected in his ''Mass,'' the 1971 work he wrote for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. A similar catholicity was reflected throughout his music. His choral compositions include not only songs in Hebrew but also ''Harvard Songs: Dedication and Lonely Men of Harvard.'' He was graduated in 1939 from Harvard, where he had studied composition with Walter Piston and Edward Burlingame Hill. A sense of his origins, however, remained strong. Koussevitzky proclaimed him a genius and probable future musical director of the Boston Symphony - ''The boy is a new Koussevitzky, a reincarnation!'' - but the older conductor urged Mr. Bernstein to improve his chances for success by changing his name. The young musician replied: ''I'll do it as Bernstein or not at all!'' He pronounced the name in the German way, as BERN-stine, and could no more abide the pronunciation BERN-steen than he could enjoy being called ''Lenny'' by casual acquaintances. In addition to his children, who all live in New York City, and his mother, of Brookline, Mass., Mr. Bernstein is survived by a sister, Shirley Bernstein of New York City, and a brother, Burton, of Bridgewater, Conn. Mr. Bernstein and his wife began a ''trial separation'' after 25 years of marriage. They continued, however, to appear together in concerts, one such occasion being a program in tribute to Alice Tully at Alice Tully Hall, where Mr. Bernstein conducted Sir William Walton's ''Facade'' with his wife as one of the two narrators. Mrs. Bernstein died in 1978 after a long illness. During Mr. Bernstein's Philharmonic decade, the orchestra engaged its first black member, the violinist Sanford Allen. But Broadway had changed by the time Mr. Bernstein's final theatrical score reached the Mark Hellinger Theater in March 1976. The long-awaited work that he and Alan Jay Lerner had composed, ''1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,'' closed after seven performances.