Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
Leonard Bernstein
(b. August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, Mass.; d. October 14, 1990 in New York City)
When West Side Story opened on Broadway on September 26, 1957, it blew apart the polite conventions of American musical theater by combining classical symphonic rigor, bebop, and Afro-Cuban dance into a searing portrait of urban conflict. Bernstein's score rejected the standard division between singing actors and dance doubles, insisting that raw emotion, social alienation, and lethal street warfare be told through relentless, symphonic choreography.
In 1960, Bernstein worked with his longtime Broadway orchestrators Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal to transform the theater score into the Symphonic Dances, a continuous nine-section suite crafted for a massive 90-piece orchestra. Rather than following the chronological narrative of the musical, the suite reorders the material into a unified psychological tone poem. The entire work is tethered together by a single recurring musical motif: the tritone—an unstable interval historically dubbed the diabolus in musica (the devil in music). An amateur singer, asked to sing the interval C up to F#, will likely fail unless they think, Ma-RI(-a), the two syllables that live in their tonal memory. The tritone animates the opening finger-snapping street whistles and shadows the piece to its unresolved end.
Symphonic Dances’ nine sections are performed without pause:
- Prologue: Finger snaps, biting syncopations, and abrasive brass fanfares establish the bitter turf rivalry between the Jets and Sharks.
- Somewhere: The street violence melts into a luminous, dream-like vision of peace, tolerance, and sanctuary.
- Scherzo: The dream expands into an airy, bustling pastoral dance of freedom and open space.
- Mambo: Reality crashes the party with a ferocious Latin dance competition at the gym. Polyrhythmic brass and driving percussion erupt with swagger. It’s a piece marching bands love to cover. They get an adrenaline rush when they surprise everyone by yelling Mambo! twice at the top of their lungs. Do symphony players similarly embrace their gig as voice actors?
- Cha-Cha: The frenzied competition subsides into an elegant, delicate ballroom dance as Tony and Maria first glimpse each other across the crowded room.
- Meeting Scene: Time stands still. Muted strings and tender vibraphone accompany the lovers’ hushed first conversation, introducing the lyrical warmth of "Maria."
- Cool: The mood turns taut and dangerous. In a complex, jazz-inflected twelve-tone fugue, the Jets battle to bottle up their fury behind a mask of icy nonchalance.
- Rumble: The coiled tension detonates into a savage street fight, culminating in the tragic deaths of gang leaders Riff and Bernardo.
- Finale: Maria’s grief and Tony’s death unfold in a haunting funeral procession. A fragile reprise of "Somewhere" hovers in the strings, drifting into silence on an unresolved cadence—a heartbreaking reminder of hope extinguished.
©2014, 2026 by Steven Hollingsworth, Creative Commons Public Attribution 3.0 United States License. Contact: steve@trecorde.net