Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season September-October 2015 | Page 39

program notes {
Midsummer Night’s Dream and the world
premiere of District Merchants, a specially
commissioned retelling of The Merchant
of Venice to commemorate Shakespeare’s
400th anniversary.

ABOUT THE CONCERT:
Romeo and Juliet

Sergei Prokofiev
Born in Sontsovka, Ukraine, April 23, 1891;
died in Moscow, March 5, 1953

Though now more than 400 years old,
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet still reigns
as the most compelling of all love stories.
And it has held as much allure for composers as for theater and film directors. As
one composer who succumbed to its spell,
Hector Berlioz, wrote: “God! What a fine
subject! How it lends itself to music!”
As he returned to the Soviet Union
in the mid-1930s after years of exile
in the West, Sergei Prokofiev chose
Romeo and Juliet as a gift to his homeland, honoring the Russian tradition of
full-length story ballets such as Swan
Lake and Sleeping Beauty. In Paris, he
had already proven his skills in creating
dance music with the ballets Pas d’acier
and The Prodigal Son for Diaghilev and
his celebrated Ballets Russes. His keen
dramatic sense had also been revealed
in a series of highly effective operas,
including The Gambler, The Love for
Three Oranges and The Fiery Angel.
With a commission from Moscow’s
Bolshoi Ballet in hand and the love story
driving his imagination, Prokofiev wrote
most of the two-hour-plus score rapidly
over the summer and early fall of 1935
while working at a country retreat for
Soviet artists in the Russian countryside.
But when he played the music for the
Bolshoi staff on October 4, they were
dismayed: Prokofiev had given his ballet
a happy ending in which Juliet awakens
in time to prevent Romeo’s suicide! In
his autobiography Prokofiev explained:
“The reasons for this bit of barbarism
were purely choreographic: living people
can dance, the dead cannot.” Convinced
that the lovers’ deaths could indeed be

staged effectively, he rewrote his ending
to match Shakespeare’s.
But more trouble arose as the ballet
went into rehearsal. Bewildered by
Prokofiev’s frequently complicated
rhythms, the dancers complained that
the music was “undanceable,” and the
Bolshoi eventually dropped the production. But Prokofiev believed deeply in
his score — a magnificent blending of
his melodic gifts, sophisticated wit, and
cinematic skill of painting pictures with
music — and in 1936, he created two
concert suites to advertise his masterpiece. Audiences fell in love with the
music, and ultimately, the Leningrad’s
Kirov Ballet mounted a triumphant
production in January 1940 that established the work as one of the jewels of
the classical ballet repertoire.

Robinson calls the score for
Romeo and Juliet “a giant
step forward in Prokofiev’s
evolution as a dramatic and
symphonic composer.”
Prokofiev biographer Harlow Robinson calls the score for Romeo and Juliet
“a giant step forward in Prokofiev’s
evolution as a dramatic and symphonic
composer. It is a remarkable synthesis
of the different aspects of his mus X