Romeo and Juliet

Composer: PROKOFIEV, Sergei
  • Prokofiev had left Russia after the Revolution, but came back in 1935, tempted by an open commission from the Kirov Theater (now called the Mariinsky Theater) to compose an opera or ballet of his choosing.1
  • Romeo and Juliet was written for the Bol’shoy Ballet, and Prokofiev finished it in 1936.2 But then the Soviet Union got a new Arts Minister, who arrested the Bol’shoy’s director Vladimir Mutnikh in Stalin’s Great Purge, which also claimed the lives of Adrian Piotrovsky, who wrote the ballet’s scenario, and Sergei Dinamov, a Shakespeare scholar whom Prokofiev had consulted during the planning stage. The ballet wouldn’t be performed until 1940. 
    • Romeo and Juliet was originally going to have a happy ending, with Friar Lawrence saving Romeo at the last minute so he can be reunited with Juliet when she wakes up. However when the ballet was finally staged, after the purge, and heavily edited, it had Shakespeare’s original tragic ending. (Make of that what you will. Here’s a beautiful NYT article about this.)

“Never was a story of more woe
Than Prokofiev’s music for ‘Romeo’.”

Galina Ulanova, who created the role of Juliet in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet3

“Of all the moderns, this tall and boyish Russian has the most definite gift of melody, the most authentic contrapuntal technic, and displays the subtlest and most imaginative use of dissonance.”

From a Chicago Herald-Examiner music critic, after hearing the orchestral suite from Romeo and Juliet in 19214

Sources

  1. Joshua Barone, “The Tortured History Behind Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ The New York Times (January 23, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/arts/music/prokofiev-romeo-and-juliet-new-york-philharmonic-new-york-city-ballet.html?. 
  2. Dorothea Redepenning, “Prokofiev, Sergey,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed December 26, 2019,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000022402. 
  3. Quoted in Chris Myers, “Romeo and Juliet Suite No. 2,” Redlands Symphony, accessed December 19, 2019, https://www.redlandssymphony.com/pieces/romeo-and-juliet. 
  4. Quoted in Phillip Huscher, “Liner notes for Prokofiev: Suite from ‘Romeo and Juliet’,” Chicago Symphony Orchestra, accessed December 26, 2019, https://csosoundsandstories.org/liner-notes-for-prokofiev-suite-from-romeo-and-juliet/.

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