No playwright’s works have been more heavily mined for musical purposes than Shakespeare’s, and none of the bard’s great tragedies has inspired more compositions than Romeo and Juliet: nearly thirty operas (including by Bellini, Delius, Gounod and Zandonai); incidental music by Martin, Amram and Stenhammar; orchestral works by Berlioz, Kabalevsky, Raff, and Tchaikovsky; miscellaneous pieces by Arne, Diamond, Granados, Rorem, and scores of others. The subject – love ̶ has a lot to do with it, of course, but love is treated in other Shakespeare plays as well. Romeo has in addition the heartbreak of the family feud, which acts as a kind of fate that hovers over the “star-crossed lovers,” something beyond their control yet something that orders their destiny.
When Prokofiev turned to Shakespeare’s play as the subject for a choreographic drama, he already had six ballets to his credit, but for his interpretation of Romeo and Juliet in music he created not only one of his very finest and most popular compositions, but what would quickly rise to become the most successful full-length, three-act ballet score of the twentieth century. The music contains a wealth of memorable themes, passionate lyricism, and compelling rhythmic excitement as well as a generous measure of comic elements, a component not usually associated with the story. Yet, as Israel Nestyev points out in his biography of the composer, no one else has “caught and expressed so well the tragedy’s light and playful moments, the aspect that endows it with fresh contrasts and sharply defined chiaroscuro effects.” Berlioz was stirred by the drama’s lyrical concentration to say something along the lines of “Shakespeare’s Romeo! Mon Dieu, what a subject! Everything in it seems designed for music.”
For all the fame and popularity Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet enjoys today, its early years were rocky and uncertain. Prokofiev wrote the music in 1934 and 1935 at the invitation of the Kirov Theater in Leningrad, which was eager to mount a new ballet by the country’s returning celebrity. (Prokofiev had just returned to his homeland after living and traveling abroad for nearly sixteen years.) However, the theater rejected the score, presumably because of the story line (“Living people can dance, the dying cannot,” Prokofiev later rationalized), though the composer may also have tripped in the political minefield of the Soviet theater world. A contract was arranged with the Bolshoi in Moscow instead, but there the music was declared “undanceable.” One wag suggested that at this point Prokofiev may well have invoked Mercutio’s line from the play, “A plague o’ both your houses!”
Since no staged performance was in sight, Prokofiev expediently arranged two orchestral suites of seven numbers each (drawn from the total of 52), as well as a set of ten numbers arranged for piano solo. (A third orchestral suite was compiled in 1946.) These suites enjoyed some currency before Romeo and Juliet was finally staged by the Kirov in 1940. But in the meantime, the honor of the premiere stage production went to Brno, Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic), where it was given, without Prokofiev’s participation, on December 30, 1938 at the opera house (today the Mahen Theater) to an enthusiastic reception. Obviously it was not “undanceable” after all! The choreography for the first Russian version was done by Leonid Lavrovsky, with Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev in the title roles. In 1946 Lavrovsky also mounted the Bolshoi’s first production, which is the one that toured the west and was later filmed.
Notes by Robert Markow
