Star-Crossed
Lovers

Rather than assembling a simple orchestral medley from his musical, Bernstein reshaped West Side Story into a continuous symphonic work. He binds its contrasting dances through recurring motifs, bold Latin rhythms, and even a jazz-inflected fugue, creating one of the rare Broadway scores to become a permanent part of the orchestral repertoire. Although the Symphonic Dances stand on their own, the concept behind the original stage work remains integral throughout.

​

West Side Story’s original choreographer, Jerome Robbins, was also its original director. The entire shape of the work’s artistic vision centres around dance and movement, and Robbins’ choreography heightens the tension between the rival gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, representing violence itself as part of the choreography. As in the Prokofiev, it is easy to imagine the movement simply by listening to the music. Bernstein’s score also uses the interval of a tritone to represent such tension (settle in, it’s time for some music theory):

​

A tritone, sometimes dramatically nicknamed ‘the Devil’s interval’, is one of the most unstable sounds in Western harmony, often creating the sense that the music needs to move somewhere else in order to feel complete. In West Side Story it appears both as an augmented fourth and a diminished fifth: the same sound on paper, but used in subtly different ways. Bernstein changes the spelling of the interval at key narrative moments to reinforce ideas of growing together and pulling apart. This tritone becomes one of the work’s central musical ideas, a persistent sound of unresolved tension.

​

It is perhaps most obvious in the Cool Fugue, where multiple melodic lines begin to interweave, becoming increasingly fraught as the layers overlap. Moments of unity do appear, but often in the form of violent orchestral outbursts. The tritone remains present throughout, like a tension that can never quite be released. Even the love themes are saturated with it, creating a sense of foreboding that shadows the score from beginning to end.

​

Bernstein unsettles not only the harmony of the piece, but the rhythm too. Drawing heavily on jazz and Latin influences, he constantly destabilises the pulse through off-beat accents and irregular groupings, blending vitality with a curious lack of grounding. The music feels intensely rhythmic, while at times making it surprisingly difficult to locate exactly where the beat is.

​

The finale frames the entire work through its quiet, devastating ending. Upper instruments repeat a musical idea associated with yearning, heard in Somewhere, while beneath them the bass remains relatively fixed, repeating the same notes almost like a death knell. As the harmony reaches upward toward an ideal, the ground beneath it refuses to move. In the musical, Tony and Maria sing ‘There’s a place for us’, a place that is never reached. The tritone remains unresolved, and the ideal remains unattained: a stark reminder that conflict and prejudice leave very little space for love or imagination, and that the only true possibility of resolution lies in the acceptance that was yearning, but never quite managed, to appear.

​

Programme notes by Benjamin Jackson