These days the Overture to Bernstein's comic opera Candide requires little introduction as it has, within the past few years, taken on a degree of popularity to rival that of the suite from Bernstein's West Side Story.

Leonard Bernstein's Second Symphony of 1949 was inspired by W.H. Auden's poem The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947. The poem seemed perfectly to capture the mood of the 1940s. The story is of a group of lonely souls sitting in a bar at night pondering the human condition. Edward Hopper's famous 1942 painting Nighthawks explores a similar theme.

Bernstein's 1944 ballet, Fancy Free, finds the composer in a much more characteristically up-beat mood with a story of three sailors having a good time on shore leave in New York.