Bernstein: “Maria” from “West-Side Story”: For Cello

“Maria”, from Leonard Bernstein‘s (1918-1990) musical West Side Story (1957) is a miniature, but a masterpiece nevertheless and probably the best known and most popular of all his compositions. Some liberties have been taken with the notation of the rhythms in the Performance Versions. Whereas Bernstein notates the song quite “squarely”, here we have tried to notate it with a little more “swing” (see Notation and Reading Problems). In the Easier Version not only are all the higher passages transposed down an octave to keep the cellist’s hand in the Neck Region, but also we return to the traditional simple “square” notation.

Edited Performance Version      Clean Performance Version      Easier Version      Piano Score

Here below is a “play-along” audio accompaniment.

A YouTube video recording of this transcription can be seen here