Oh hello there...
...is that Josef Stalin?
Ah yes, Sergei Prokofiev here.
I’m ringing because I’m very, very homesick.
Ah, well you see, Comrade Stalin,
when I left Russia, I imagined land of glory in Europe.
But now they’re telling me my music’s too avant-garde.
“It’s too many notes, Sergei."
"How you expect anyone to play this, Sergei.”
Yada yada yada.
Anyway, I’d like to take up your kind offer
of allowing me back to homeland to be treated like returning hero.
Aha! Yes, I know, right?
Will be BEST decision of my life!
As soon as Prokofiev returns to Soviet Russia in the early 1930s,
he’s commissioned to write a ballet for Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre.
It’s to be based on Romeo and Juliet,
adapted by Adrian Piotrovsky, the Kirov’s dramatist,
and director Sergei Radlov.
Prokofiev composes the music for it in a burst of frenzied activity during the summer of 1935.
The ballet begins with our hero Romeo walking in the streets of Verona, Italy.
Romeo’s theme is reasonably sleepy cos it’s early morning
and he's in a bit of a daze.
The streets awake with peppy alarm clock music.
People are gathering for their usual gossip fests and espressos.
Rousing horns set the joyous mood.
But the merriment is broken by a quarrel.
Shrill violins fly away and an edgy timpani crackles with energy.
The whole street’s descended into a mass swordfight.
Swordfight! Swordfight!
The skirmish is between the Montague and Capulet families –
- sworn enemies in a long and bitter feud.
The Duke of Verona appears.
A volcanic crescendo leads to a very loud, dissonant crash
when the Duke orders the families to cease fighting.
He who breaks the truce will be punished severely.
Later, in the Capulet household, servants are readying for a ball.
It’s in honour of Lord Capulet’s daughter, Juliet, who is coming of age.
A girl of 14, Juliet’s music
– quick violin scales and skipping woodwinds –
brims with youthful innocence.
As she catches her reflection in the bedroom mirror,
she clocks that her childhood’s now over and gets all sad.
The music changes to reflect the solemn awakening of maturity.
The guests start arriving for the ball.
They strut pompously to the lofty strains of an 18th century minuet.
They’re too self-absorbed to notice three gate-crashers disguised in masks
who parade through the front door to the colourful accompaniment of tambourines.
A cornet sounds to announce Romeo.
A clarinet announces Romeo’s cousin Benvolio.
And an oboe for his best friend Mercutio, the joker of the pack.
The second he's in,
Mercutio is enlivening the dull company with party tricks and show-off dancing.
But now it’s time for the Capulet nobility to spread some extreme,
masculine pheromones across the dancefloor.
Violins stride and brass pulsate in a metronome-like
beat – a signature of Prokofiev’s music.
How devastated the snobby Capulets would be
to know their theme is now associated with reality TV series The Apprentice
and erotic movie Caligula.
A saxophone – unusual for the orchestra – enters to accompany their slow, deliberate steps.
A serene cornet announces Juliet’s entrance and Romeo watches her flit between guests.
One of these guests is Count Paris,
a young nobleman whom Juliet’s parents have arranged for her to marry.
This barely sparks joy for Juliet.
She’s far more excited by gatecrasher Romeo.
Violins and violas send love hormones across the dance floor with a sweet madrigal.
But the romance is cut short by Tybalt
Juliet’s nasty cousin
who recognises Romeo as an intruder from the Montague family.
He threatens him but not before his uncle, Lord Capulet,
intervenes to cool time on his badmouthing.
After the ball’s, Juliet retires to her balcony where she dreams of Romeo.
Suddenly, Romeo appears – elated and declaring his love for Juliet.
The strings play a sweet melody with harp shimmering beneath
as the enchanted couple dance to a sweeping love theme.
The horns let out an amorous sigh.
Romeo and Juliet visit the chapel of Friar Laurence to get married.
He’s a dignified guy with dignified music.
Friar Laurence believes the union of Romeo and Juliet
will end the feud between the Montagues and Capulets.
Ha!
Dream on, Papa Laurie!
A public festival is taking place back on the streets of Verona.
Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio watch a band of mandolin players strum their instruments.
But the chirpy folk dancing lulls us into a false sense of security.
Nasty, nasty Tybalt has rocked up.
Boo!
Angry about Romeo’s gatecrashing, he challenges him to a duel.
Um...
no thanks, dude.
Mercutio instead intervenes and gets into a furious swordfight with Tybalt.
He playfully struts his stuff,
joking with his usual show-off moves to the gathering crowds, just as he did at that ball.
But this time his dancing violin theme grinds to a halt
because Tybalt stabs him to death.
Romeo hits back in revenge and the music for the duel swirls and lunges dizzily.
We hear some massive orchestral thuds as Romeo drives his sword through Tybalt.
Weepy-waily Capulets rush to the scene to raise Tybalt aloft and lead him off in a funeral march.
The Duke of Verona banishes Romeo for killing Tybalt in breach of his truce.
Romeo spends his final night with Juliet before his departure.
As the lovers awake at the break of dawn, a solo viola d’amore sings out their love theme.
Played on this unusual Baroque instrument,
it sounds so much more intimate and fragile than when we heard it on Juliet’s balcony.
Because they know it's time for bye-byes.
Romeo leaves her before Ma and Pa Capulet arrive with the man Juliet’s meant to marry.
Oh god...
...uber-keen wet blanket Paris is back.
Urgh!
"Mum, dad...this guy makes me PHYSICALLY SICK."
Cellos play a lamenting version of Juliet’s once-radiant
theme as she protests the arrangement.
She decides to seek out the only person trusts:
our favourite cutie Friar Laurence.
He’s got a cunning plan:
dose Juliet up on some sleeping meds so she appears dead
and then inform Romeo of the plan
so that they can meet after her family place her in the Capulet tomb.
When she awakes, they’ll leave Verona together, happily forever ever.
Juliet drinks the potion in her bedroom
and as it takes effect four creeping notes repeat over...
and over...
...you get the idea she falls fast asleep.
The following morning, Juliet’s servants panic as they’re unable to wake her.
"Wake up! Wake up!"
They announce her death to a rumble of brass instruments.
Her family place Juliet in the Capulet tomb to the gloomy sound of funeral music.
So far, all is going to plan.
But something’s gone wrong.
Friar Laurence’s message explaining the plan never reached Romeo.
He hears that Juliet has died.
He visits the tomb to find her seemingly-lifeless body.
The once-joyful love theme is now melancholic to express Romeo’s intense grief.
Unwilling to live without her, he poisons himself.
Juliet wakes and finds Romeo dead.
We hear her familiar theme from the beginning of the ballet.
But this time, rather than rapid violins and skipping woodwinds,
the music’s a slow, heavy requiem.
A deathly contrabassoon and bass clarinet moan from the depths of despair
as Juliet stabs herself with Romeo’s dagger.
A cor anglais ends the ballet, as though announcing the final line of Shakespeare’s play.
When Prokofiev composed the music in 1935, it was with a very different ending in mind.
Sergei Radlov and Adrian Piotrovsky
those guys from the Kirov Theatre
devised an ending in which Juliet awakes when Romeo’s at her grave.
The couple then flee Verona together happily ever.
The happy ending made sense to Prokofiev from a choreographic perspective:
“The dead can’t dance if they're lying down”.
But then Sergei Radlov fell out with the Kirov’s officials and resigned.
Topped with the assassination of Leningrad’s Communist Party boss,
it just wasn’t the time for the Kirov to be staging Prokofiev’s ballet so they cancelled it.
Luckily, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre took on the project instead.
But things worsened when the Soviet cultural authorities
deemed the happy ending a step too far.
They forced Prokofiev to restore Shakespeare’s own tragic ending.
But even THAT wasn’t enough to revive the doomed ballet.
You see, the Soviet authorities were cracking down on anyone who didn’t conform to their politics.
In the paranoid culture of Stalin’s purges
WHO'S THERE?! WHO'S THERE?!
Adrian Piotrovsky was denounced as a degenerate modernist and shot.
So too was the intended director.
The only solution was to stage the ballet outside the Soviet Union in some random provincial theatre
...in Czechoslovakia!
So the world premiere in 1938 passed most people by.
Not even Prokofiev was permitted to attend.
Eventually, the Kirov - the very theatre for which
Prokofiev wrote the ballet – did approach him to stage it there.
But the choreographer made huge changes to the score without consulting Prokofiev.
And then the dancers complained that his music lacked clear-cut rhythms.
They said it was undanceable, and threatened to boycott the ballet.
“You must make do with what you’ve got” Prokofiev retorted.
“You people want drums, not music!”
The dancers dragged him onstage to listen for himself.
And...well let’s just say that stubborn Prokofiev did relent a teeny bit.
“Very well...
"I shall rewrite the music here and there and..."
"erm..."
"add something..."
"maybe just a little bit.”
Romeo and Juliet premiered at the Kirov in January 1940 to rapturous applause.
The crowning achievement of Soviet dramatic ballet, it was even awarded the Stalin Prize.
Prokofiev’s accessible music captured the complex emotions
of Shakespeare’s characters and the nuances of the plot,
without a single word spoken.
What’s more, this was simple, lyrical music with a broad appeal for the Soviet people.
Readily understandable music for the masses.
So the Soviet regime regarded it as a faithful example of socialist realism.
Socialist realism was Stalin’s policy of ensuring that music,
art and dance always had an element of propaganda,
using dramatic narrative to tell us how fun it is being communist.
In fact, people saw in the evil-sound Dance of the Knights a caricature of the old Russian nobility,
the hated royal family who were overthrown in the Russian Revolution.
They also saw in Prokofiev boisterous music for Romeo not the angsty teen of Shakespeare’s text
but a progressive Soviet hero eager to uproot the established order of
things with his comrades Mercutio and Benvolio.
But the public success of the ballet came at a personal price for Prokofiev.
He’d struggled five years to bring it to the stage because of the state’s interfering cronies,
the paper-pushers who murdered his colleagues.
Having been forced to change the ending, much of the music and the choreographic style,
Prokofiev had bent over backwards for the Soviet authorities.
The ballerina who played Juliet at the Kirov premiere
rose a toast in recognition of this at a celebratory dinner on opening night
with her own take on Shakespeare’s text.
For what was the archetypal love story, getting Romeo and Juliet to
stage had been a tortured saga of compromise that broke Prokofiev.
It was the first in a long series of run-ups that he had with Stalin’s repressive dictatorship,
a relationship that eventually broke down with the tragic arrest of his wife
and formal censure of his music.
OK, so returning to Russia was WORST decision of my life.
Thanks for nothing, Stalin!