Romeo and Juliet

Montagues and the Capulets

The Young Juliet

Masks

Romeo and Juliet

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is not only the greatest ballet score by any Russian composer since Tchaikovsky but also the most inspired of all ballets on Shakespearean themes. Even so, although it was completed in 1936 and first performed in Czechoslovakia in 1938, it wasn’t seen in the Soviet Union until 1940. The Bolshoi rejected it as “undanceable” and even when it went into rehearsal at the Kirov it met with much opposition: “The music seemed to us incomprehensible and almost impossible to dance to,” recalled Galina Ulanova, “We were badly hampered by the unusual orchestration… and the frequent changes of rhythm, too, gave us a great deal of trouble.” Her Juliet was, however, to become one of the greatest triumphs of her illustrious career.

It was because of that initial opposition that Prokofiev wrote the orchestral suites which have since made Romeo and Juliet as much a work for the concert hall as for the theatre. One of the most familiar items of all is Montagues and Capulets from the ball at the house of the Capulets, where the knights dance on heavy feet, as though they still had their armour on. In a graceful middle section Juliet dances with Paris, her family’s preferred suitor. Shakespeare’s heroine, who has yet to meet Romeo at this stage, is still not fourteen, as Juliet the young girl so vividly suggest - playful on strings and woodwind, innocent on clarinet, sentimental on flute.

The first we hear of Romeo in this selection is in Masks as he and his friends make their incognito entry to the Capulets’ ball - stealthily at first but with increasing, indeed bounding confidence. Romeo and Juliet, the ballet’s equivalent to Shakespeare’s balcony scene, is set in a delicate nocturnal atmosphere created by harp and muted strings. Beginning hesitantly with Romeo’s theme on solo strings and Juliet’s nervous answer on flute, the dialogue develops in intensity on an arch of ecstatic melody which finally falls back into the nocturnal stillness.