Romeo and Juliet, Suite from the Ballet, Op. 64 (selection)

Program notes

About the Work

Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ began as a commission in the mid-1930s and very nearly ended as a scandal. The composer had returned to the Soviet Union after years abroad, and a ballet on Shakespeare’s tragedy, first for the Kirov in Leningrad and then for the Bolshoi in Moscow, was to be one of his major homecoming statements. What he delivered unsettled the dancers and administrators who received it. The score was long, the rhythms were tricky, and, most notoriously, Prokofiev had at first drafted a happy ending in which the lovers survive. He defended the change on purely choreographic grounds: ‘live people can dance, but the dying can hardly be expected to dance in bed.’ Wiser counsel prevailed and Shakespeare’s ending was restored, but the early resistance ran deeper than the plot. The Bolshoi declared the music impossible to dance to, and the dancers complained that they could not hear it and that its rhythms were unpredictable. The full stage premiere was delayed for years and finally took place not in Russia at all but in Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia, in 1938. The Soviet premiere followed in Leningrad in 1940, with the great Galina Ulanova as Juliet, and the ballet’s triumph was at last secured.

Long before the dancers caught up with him, Prokofiev made sure the music itself would be heard. Impatient and shrewd about his own livelihood, he extracted concert suites from the ballet (two of them in 1936, before the staged premiere, and a third in 1946), choosing and re-ordering numbers to make self-standing orchestral sequences rather than a danced narrative. These suites carried the music into concert halls worldwide and became, for most listeners, the way they first met the work. They do not follow Shakespeare’s plot in order; they are anthologies of the ballet’s best pages, and a conductor is free to draw from across all three to build a programme.

That is exactly what happens here. The selection performed in this concert is the conductor’s own: a sequence assembled from the numbers Prokofiev spread across his three concert suites, chosen and ordered for this occasion rather than dictated by the composer. Such freedom is in the spirit of the suites themselves, which Prokofiev never intended as fixed. A typical programme of this kind gathers the most vivid set-pieces: the brooding, jackbooted ‘Montagues and Capulets’ with its famous heavy tread; the delicate, skittering portrait of ‘Juliet as a Young Girl’; the scenes at the Capulets’ ball and in the streets of Verona; the tender balcony music; and the tragic close. The exact contents will vary, but the dramatic arc, from civic menace through young love to catastrophe, survives any reasonable ordering, because Prokofiev’s characterisation is so sharp that each number announces its own place in the story.

What unites the whole is Prokofiev’s gift for instantly legible musical portraiture. He gives the feuding clans a theme of crushing weight, gives Juliet a music that literally grows up over the course of the ballet, and shadows the lovers’ tenderness with harmonic premonitions of doom. It is film-music vividness wedded to symphonic craft, which is one reason the suites have outlived the choreographic disputes that nearly buried the score, and why they remain among the most beloved orchestral showpieces of the twentieth century.

What to Listen For

The number almost everyone knows is ‘Montagues and Capulets’ (often titled ‘Dance of the Knights’): listen for the dissonant, hanging chords that open it like a warning, then the famous striding theme: brass and strings hammering out a slow, arrogant march that seems to make the whole orchestra walk in heavy boots. It is the sound of two proud houses spoiling for a fight, and once you have heard it you will recognise it anywhere. Notice, in its central section, a sudden lightening: a thin, prim little tune on the flute and a sweetly bowed solo, a glimpse of Juliet’s grace inside the menace.

For ‘Juliet as a Young Girl’, the contrast could not be sharper. Prokofiev paints a girl who cannot keep still: quicksilver scurrying runs in the high woodwinds and strings, breaking off into a tender, lyrical melody and then darting away again. The music’s restlessness is the characterisation: she is thirteen, mercurial, not yet the tragic heroine. Track how that lyrical strain returns, deepened, later in the work; Prokofiev lets her music mature as she does.

Throughout, listen for the way Prokofiev uses the orchestra as a cast of characters. The tenor saxophone and lower brass add darker, heavier colours; the celesta, harp, and high strings open up the private, nocturnal world of the lovers. In the balcony and love music, the melodies stretch long and warm but are repeatedly clouded by a darker harmony underneath: beauty with a shadow across it, the tragedy already written into the tenderness. And in the closing pages, whatever numbers end the selection, attend to how the great love themes return stripped of their warmth, slowed and hollowed, as the music that once meant first love is made to mean death. The seed of the ending is sown in the first heavy chord.