Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, Op.75

Folk Dance

Scene

Minuet

The Young Juliet

Masks

The Montagues and the Capulets

Friar Laurance

Mercutio

Dance of the Girls with the Lillies

Romeo and Juliet before parting

Prokofiev’s motive in arraniing a suite of piano pieces from the score of Romeo and Juliet was not, in the first place, to enlarge the keyboard repertoire. As one of the most resourceful piano composer of his time, he was already well represented in that area. Still less was it to cash in on the success of the ballet: at this stage, two years after it was finished, Romeo and Juliet was singularly unseccessful and had been rejected by both the Bolshoi and the Kirov, although the Bolshoi had actually commissioned it. Prokofiev’s first move was to put together an orchestral suite of seven numbers from the ballet and, when that proved popular, he arranged a second orchestral suite which was even more attractive than the first. The piano suite was written in 1937 and first performed by the composer in Moscow in the same year.

The success of the suites led to the first performance of the ballet, in Brno in 1938, and Romeo and Juliet finally reached the Soviet stage, in the Kirov, in 1940. Even then there were protests from the performers up to the very last miinute. As Ulanova, who took the part of Juliet, later confessed: “We simply did not understand the music. We were disturbed by the weird orchestration, the frequent changes in the rhythm, which made it difficult to dance. We were not used to such musci and were afraid of it.”

These, of course, are among the qualities which make Romeo and Juliet such an original ballet and at the same time such interesting music in its own right. The ten pieces of the piano suite, although mainly straight transcriptions from the first two orchestral suites, sound as effective in this version as in any other. Prokofiev was incapable of the keyboard solecism associated with the kind of arrangement. Moreover, while the inspired rhythmic and melodic content obviously loses little in this version, it is illuminating to find how much more of the colour of the score is in the harmonies than in the orchestration.

The first two movement are both outdoor numbers - Folk Dance from the second act, which takes place against the background of a festival in the streets of Verona, and Scene subtitled the Street Awakens from the beginning of the ballet. The next four movements are all from the scene set in the house of Juliet’s family, the Capulets, in the first act. The Minuet, to which the guests arrive at the ball, is another attractive set piece. But the greatness of Prokofiev’s score rests partly in the characterisation - like the contradictory portrait of Juliet the Little Girl, childishly playful, teenage sentimental, adult emotional in unpredictable turns - and partly in its creation of dramatic atmosphere, as when Romeo and Mercutio appear at the Capulets’ in Masks. In Montagues and Capulets the knights dance in aggressively heavy-footed rhythms and, iin the middle section, Juliet enters sweetly and gracefully, and to the evident delight of Romeo.

There are two more inspired character studies - Friar Laurance more than faintly sanctimonious in the outer sections but obviously compassionate at the centre, and the fatally irrepressible Mercutio. The Dance of the Maidens with the Lillies comes from the third act, after Juliet has taken the sleeping draught, and is performed by sinuous girls from the Antilles bearing gifts from paris and wearing a delicate application of local oclour. Romeo and Juliet before Parting, which is the most richly scored part of the ballet, must have caused considerable problems in the transcription. It is true that the variety of colour is not available, but the emotional quality - even the big climax, where four horns carry the melody through a thicket of orchestral arpeggios, and even the sinister premonitions in the tuba and double-bass unisons - is unimpaired.