Discovery

Tragedy to Transcendence

It is perhaps hard to imagine that Romeo and Juliet, arguably the most popular ballet for the twentieth century, has never been performed as the composer intended. Prokofiev endured five years of artistic and political interference before seeing the ballet premiered. This production of the ballet seeks to correct a historic wrong. It is a new production based on exclusive archival research conducted in Moscow by musicologist Simon Morrison.

Prokofiev conceived the ballet in 1935 in collaboration with innovative Soviet dramatist Sergei Radlov, who re-imagined the familiar tragedy “as a struggle for the right to love by young, strong, and progressive people battling against feudal traditions and feudal outlooks on marriage and family.” Prokofiev then set down to work, creating a score that involved transcendence, not tragedy.

What followed has no parallel in ballet history. The artistic climate in Stalin’s Russia darkened: in dance, music, and drama, timidly conservative neoclassicism supplanted exciting, accessible innovation. Not only was Prokofiev forced to rewrite the ending of the ballet – replacing the entire fourth act with an epilogue, he was forced to insert large-scale solo dances breaking up the dramatic flow. A divertissement involving three exotic dances in act III was scrapped for logistical reasons. The Kirov Theater dancers complained about the difficulty of the rhythms; the original choreographer, Leonid Lavrovsky, insisted on a thickening of the orchestration. As the demands piled up, Prokofiev became increasingly frustrated, but each time, he complied with them. The ballet received its Russian premiere in 1940. When Prokofiev saw it, he had a hard time recognizing his own music. He pleaded for the changes to be undone, to no avail.