"Fancy Free" – Inscribed Presentation Copy to Adolph Green

New York: Boosey and Hawkes [Jalni Publications, Inc.]. 1988. Corrected Edition. Instrumental study score (27 cm). [PN] HPS 1135. 153 pp.  Inscribed by the composer at the head of the first page of music in blue ink, circling the printed dedication "For Adolph Green" and adding "with my love / Lenny."  A very special copy of the score for Jerome Robbins' first, spectacularly successful ballet, inscribed and dedicated by the conductor and composer to his friend, playwright Adolph Green, the dedicatee of the work.  Dampstaining and a little rippling to covers and along the foredge but internally unaffected and with clean pages throughout. 

This vibrant, jazz-tinged score was Bernstein’s first collaboration with choreographer Jerome Robbins.  Its patriotic high spirits affirm the energy and vitality of a great city – Bernstein’s beloved New York – during the anxious years of World War II.  Bernstein describes the scenario: “Three sailors explode on the stage.  They are on a 24-hour shore leave in the city and on the prowl for girls.  The tale of how they first meet one, then a second girl, and how they fight over them, lose them, and in the end take off after a third, is the story of the ballet.”  Robbins sought to create a quintessentially American ballet; Bernstein obliged him with a score that was kinetic and tuneful, refracting popular dance music styles through a prism of angular melodies and syncopated rhythms.  The resulting ballet was a huge success, drawing sold-out crowds to the Metropolitan Opera House.  

Adolph Green was a playwright, performer and lyricist who had a remarkable six-decade collaboration with the equally multi-hyphenated Betty Comden.  The duo's first Broadway effort teamed them with Bernstein for On the Town, an expansion of Fancy Free, and they went on to co-author other hit Broadway musicals like Bells Are Ringing, as well as the screenplays for Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon.  (20943)

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Autograph Document

Dance

Song

Printed Music

• Sold