Romeo and Juliet (Orchestral Suites) Opus 64

Sergey Prokofiev (1891 - 1953)

Although a period of almost twenty years separates this compositions. Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and his ballet Romeo and Juliet are strikingly close in musical language. In both, the composer successfully combines the formal mannerisms and especially the dance gestures of an earlier age with the most characteristic features of his own style – a wealth of melodic invention, strong rhythmic drive, vivid contrasts in pace and orchestration and above all, a sure sense of the dramatic. Not only is much of the music of the ballet reminiscent of the earlier work (the music of the lovers’ farewell in Act III of the Symphony’s slow movement, for example), but Prokofiev further acknowledged their musical ties by quotation: the Gavotte from the Classical Symphony reappears, in an extended and elaborated form, to accompany the guests’ departure from the Capulets’ ball. The Symphony, finished in September 1917, was almost the last work written before Prokofiev left his homeland for the United States in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Romeo and Juliet was one of the first works he composed on his return; most of the score was sketched out in the summer of 1935 at the rest-home of the Boishoi Theatre near Tarusa on the river Oka, south-west of Moscow. From its first performance in Revolutionary Petrograd on 21 April 1918, the Symphony immediately became the popular “classic” the composer hoped it might. The ballet, however, had its first performance outside Russia, in Brno, on 30 December 1938; it was only after four years of wrangling, which involved the revision of, first the plot, then the music, through the incorporation of several entirely new dance-numbers and the reinforcement of much of the original orchestration, that it was presented in Leningrad, and thereafter became an international success. It was largely because the ballet at first failed to reach the stage that Prokofiev arranged excerpts for concert performance. He extracted no less than three orchestral suites from the scene two, each of seven movements, in 1936, and third of six movements (given the separate opus number 101) in 1946-along with a set of ten piano pieces opus 75 in 1937. The numbers were selected on purely musical considerations; each of the suites presents a succession of contrasts between dance and character sketches, intimate genre pieces.

Sir George Solti’s compilation of numbers from the ballet has quite a different and arguably more interesting basis. For the most part it traces the intimate love story at the heart of Shakespeare’s and Prokofiev’s tragedy, largely avoiding direct reference to the Montague/Capulet feud or the subsidiary characters in the drama. It effectively retains the continuity of the most moving sections of the ballet score the opening street scene in which the character of Romeo is introduced, the youthful beauty and innocence of Juliet in the midst of the ball, the musically ecstatic balcony scene, the rhythmically terse duels between Mercutio and Tybalt, Tybalt and Romeo, and Juliet’s death.