Discovery

Chronology of Sergey Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet

November 1934: Prokofiev travels to Leningrad to discuss prospective performances of his operas at the State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet. He and the dramatist Adrian Piotrovsky, a disciple of the theater director Sergey Radlov, discuss potential subjects for a new ballet. Prokofiev takes to the idea of setting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to music.

January 1935: In Paris, Prokofiev drafts a 5-act scenario for the ballet, which he submits to Piotrovsky and Radlov for revision. Radlov, a long-time friend of the composer, had staged a radical version of Shakespeare’s drama at his Studio Theater in April 1934, and encouraged Prokofiev to incorporate its central themes into the ballet.

May 1935: Prokofiev, Piotrovsky, and Radlov settle on a 4-act Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending. Vladimir Mutnykh, the new artistic director of the Bolshoy Theater in Moscow, commissions the ballet for production in the 1935-36 season. Radlov discusses the scenario with Sergey Dinamov, a Central Committee official on the board of the Bolshoy Theater. Dinamov approves the scenario, suggesting that, given the happy ending, the ballet be subtitled “on motives of Shakespeare.”

June 1935: Radlov writes an article for the newspaper Sovetskoye iskusstvo (Soviet Art) in which he stresses the ballet’s central themes: class struggle, radical conflict between comedy and tragedy, the clash of youth and feudal society. In a related essay for Teatr i dramaturgiya (Theater and Dramaturgy), he declares Romeo and Juliet the most “Komsomol-like” of Shakespeare’s dramas.

September 1935: Prokofiev completes the piano score of the ballet in Polenovo and begins annotating it for orchestration.

October 1935: Prokofiev performs the piano score for adjudication at the Bolshoy Theater. He receives severe criticism from the conductor Yuriy Fayer. A debate ensues about the complexity of the musical syntax and the unorthodox approach to Shakespeare. The happy ending fuels the debate.

December 1935: From Casablanca, Prokofiev writes to Radlov asking whether he plans to “press on” with his conception of the ballet, and whether he has devised another ending.

January 1936: Prokofiev performs acts I-III of the piano score for adjudication at the offices of Soviet Art. Mutnykh and Dinamov attend. Dinamov continues to advocate the happy ending, stressing that “in Prokofiev’s work, the two main characters of Shakespeare’s drama must not die.” His position is countered by the composer Alexander Ostretsov, who declares that “the life-enhancing tone of Prokofiev’s entire piece, clearly manifest in the culmination, will not be weakened if he follows in Shakespeare’s footsteps in the denouement.”

January–February 1936: Dmitriy Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and his ballet The Limpid Stream are denounced in the pages of Pravda. Platon Kerzhentsev, the Chairman of the watchdog All-Union Committee on Arts Affairs, begins to purge the Bolshoy Theater administration as part of an ideological campaign against anti-democratic, “formalist” experimentation in Soviet art.

June 1936: Kerzhentsev submits a memorandum to Stalin and Molotov reporting his intention to dismiss the conductor Nikolay Golovanov from the Bolshoy Theater and to reevaluate the repertoire. The memorandum lists Romeo and Juliet as a prospective production for the 1936-37 season.

August 1936: Prokofiev begins composing the tragic ending of the ballet; it remains incomplete, however, until July 1938.

April 1937: Mutnykh is arrested; those works commissioned by him for the Bolshoy Theater, including Romeo and Juliet, are pulled from the repertoire.

June 1937: Kerzhentsev denounces Prokofiev’s Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October as “incomprehensible.”

June 1937: Mark Bicurin, director of the Regional Theater in Brno, Czechoslovakia, approaches Prokofiev about staging Romeo and Juliet there. The production, which opens for seven performances in December 1938, features the tragic ending. Prokofiev is unable to attend.

July 1937: Piotrovsky is arrested.

December 1937: Kerzhentsev submits a memorandum to Stalin and Molotov regarding Soviet musical affairs. He comments with reference to the Romeo and Juliet orchestral suites that Prokofiev is seeking “to overcome formalism and approach realism.”

August 1938: Prokofiev receives a telegram from the Kirov Theater in Leningrad expressing interest in staging Romeo and Juliet during the 1939-40 Season. The invitation is initiated by choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky, who had earlier proposed staging the ballet with students from the Leningrad Choreographic Technical College.

September 1938: Dinamov is arrested.

February 1939: Prokofiev informs Radlov that Lavrovsky was seeking changes to the ballet, but that he “put a stop” to most of them.

August 1939: Finding the music of the ballet diffuse, Lavrovsky insists on the inclusion of bravura variations for Romeo and Juliet in act I (the balcony and ballroom scenes). Prokofiev rejects the requests, informing the conductor Isay Sherman that “I’m not going to change anything. […] Radlov and I checked the length of each scene to the precise second. The work was composed in 1934-36 and now that I have other projects I don’t intend on going back to it.”

October 1939: Lavrovsky sends two telegrams to Prokofiev imploring him to compose the variations, claiming that work on the ballet has come to a halt. The composer reluctantly fashions the variations using music from the abandoned happy ending. The Kirov Theater soloists Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev express dissatisfaction with the music, after which it is revised.

November 1939 to January 1940: Lavrovsky enlists Sherman to negotiate a series of changes to the scenario and the music with Prokofiev. Beyond writing and revising the variations for Romeo and Juliet, the changes include the elimination of three exotic dances from act III, expanding the music for Paris, reducing the music for Mercutio, and adding a pensive scene to act III called “Romeo in Mantua.” Lavrovsky also insists on adding a large group dance at the beginning of act I. Prokofiev point blank refuses this last request, at which point Lavrovsky threatens to insert music of his own choosing into the act. Following a tense confrontation, Prokofiev backs down.

January 1940: Romeo and Juliet receives its Russian premiere at the Kirov Theater in Leningrad. Prokofiev discovers that Lavrovsky had altered the orchestration without his approval, thickening the textures and amplifying the dynamics. Repeats had also been added without his knowledge.

March 1940: Prokofiev protests the unauthorized changes to his music in a letter to the Kirov Theater. He subsequently complains to Sherman: “For four months nothing has been done and I don’t know the state in which the ballet will reach Moscow.”

March 1940: Stalin approves a request from the Committee on Arts Affairs for a performance of the ballet at the Bolshoy Theater. Romeo and Juliet thereafter enters the world repertoire.

1941: Prokofiev writes an autobiographical sketch for publication in Sovetskaya muzyka (Soviet Music): “There was quite a fuss at the time [1935-36] about our attempts to give Romeo and Juliet a happy ending in the last act, Romeo arrives a minute earlier, finds Juliet alive and everything ends well. The reasons for this bit of barbarism were purely choreographic: living people can dance, the dying cannot.”