Who wrote the music for West Side Story?

Leonard Bernstein, with lyrics by a 25-year-old Stephen Sondheim in his first Broadway job - a debut that would be remarkable even if the show were forgettable. Bernstein was simultaneously a conductor of the New York Philharmonic, which was regarded at the time as an awkward thing for a serious musician to be doing.

The score is much stranger than its popularity suggests. It is built on the tritone - the interval medieval theorists nicknamed the devil in music - which opens Maria and runs through the whole work as a unifying device, and it uses jazz, Latin rhythms and symphonic development in a form that had mostly been songs strung together. America is in alternating bars of six-eight and three-four, which is why it sounds unstable and why it is difficult to dance.

The show was nearly abandoned repeatedly. It began as a story about Jewish and Catholic families, was reworked around Puerto Rican and white gangs, and producers refused it for years as too dark - it has two acts and a body count, and no happy ending. Its original title was East Side Story. The 1961 film won ten Oscars, and Rita Moreno's win made her the first Latina to take one.