Sergei Prokofiev
Born April 23, 1891, Sontsovka, Ukraine.
Died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia.
Suite from Romeo and Juliet
During Sergei Prokofiev's last trip to Chicago, in January 1937, he led the Chicago Symphony in selections from his new, still unstaged ballet, Romeo and Juliet. This was the composer's fifth visit to Chicago, and he clearly felt at home: shortly after he arrived in town he sat down with a Tribune reporter and talked freely while eating apple pie at a downtown luncheonette. He was staying in the same hotel room where he had lived for several months during his Chicago visit in 1921, when he presided over preparations for the world premiere of his opera The Love for Three Oranges. He told the Tribune that his Romeo and Juliet featured the kind of “new melodic line” that he thought would prove to be the salvation of modern music—one, he said, that would have immediate appeal yet sound like nothing written before. “Of all the moderns,” the Herald Examiner critic wrote after hearing Romeo and Juliet later in the week, “this tall and boyish Russian has the most definite gift of melody, the most authentic contrapuntal technic [sic], and displays the subtlest and most imaginative use of dissonance.”
Chicago was the first American city to hear music from Romeo and Juliet (following recent performances in Moscow and Paris), and not for the only time in Prokofiev's career, orchestral excerpts were premiered before the ballet itself had been staged. The idea for a ballet version of the Shakespeare play came from the director Sergei Radlov, who was a friend of Prokofiev and had mounted the first Russian production of The Love for Three Oranges. He and Prokofiev worked together to flesh out a scenario early in 1935, and the composer began to write the music that summer. But the Kirov Ballet, which had commissioned the work, unexpectedly backed out, and the Bolshoi Theater took over the project. There were further problems with the score itself, including Prokofiev's initial insistence on a happy ending—“Living people can dance,” he later wrote in defense of the decision, “but the dead cannot dance lying down.” The end was ultimately changed to match Shakespeare's, but then the Bolshoi staff pronounced Prokofiev's music “unsuitable to dance” and dropped out as well. The premiere of Romeo and Juliet eventually was given in Brno, Czechoslovakia, without Prokofiev's participation (he didn't attend the opening, in December 1938) and the ballet wasn't staged in Russia until January 1940. In the meantime, Prokofiev made two orchestral suites of seven excerpts each, and it was the first of these that he conducted in Chicago. (At this week's concerts, Myung-Whun Chung conducts selections from both of these suites, as well as a third suite Prokofiev later compiled.)
Although no other play by Shakespeare has inspired as many musical treatments as Romeo and Juliet, including more than twenty operas (Gounod's, which the teenage Prokofiev saw in Saint Petersburg, is the most enduring), Prokofiev's is the first large-scale ballet. It's one of his most important works, merging the primitive style of his radical earlier music, a newfound classicism, and the sumptuous lyricism of which he was so proud.
This week's excerpts begin with The Montagues and the Capulets—menacing music to depict the warring families, introduced by the prince's powerful order to preserve peace. The opening chords, which seem to grow in intensity to the breaking point, set a tone of sorrow and inevitable tragedy. The big ominous marching theme, recently discovered by the television advertising industry, was originally the Dance of the Knights from the act 2 ballroom scene. The centerpiece of the movement, with its lovely flute solo, is Juliet's dance with Paris—the moment Romeo catches his first glimpse of the girl who will quickly steal his heart.
In the more fully sketched portrait of the young girl that follows, we are reminded that she is an innocent thirteen-year-old, capricious and playful, and (in the midsection flute duet) eager for romance. With the furtive, shifty Masks, Romeo appears at the Capulets (with his fellow Montagues, Mercutio and Benvolio) in full masquerade. The music perfectly captures both the nervousness and boldness of their entry into hostile territory. Next comes the balcony scene—passionate and tender, richly lyrical, and one of the most rapturous moments in all ballet. This is spacious, magically scored night music, underlined by the melancholy cut of Prokofiev's grand, floating melodies.
Tybalt's Death, by contrast, is tightly packed with incident and action and is almost cinematic in the way it compresses events into a short time. In notes written in his score, Prokofiev characterized both the high-bravado duel between Tybalt and Mercutio (“they look at each other like two fighting bulls; blood is boiling”) and the subsequent encounter between Romeo and Tybalt, who “fight wildly, to the death.” Fifteen powerful, hammering chords tell of Tybalt's fate. Prokofiev concludes with Tybalt's funeral procession, over a pounding ostinato.
Friar Laurence, waiting to marry the lovers in his cell, is depicted by a solo bassoon with strings. His solemn portrait leads to a lively Dance, with its jaunty oboe melody, and then to the elegant dance of the girls who bring lilies to Juliet's window on the morning of her wedding.
Romeo at Juliet's Tomb is a lament—a tragic march of power and intensity, and, when it's overpowered by the lovers' theme, great poignancy. This is the music that was played at Prokofiev's funeral (oddly paralleling the fate of Fauré and Melisande's death scene) on a tape recorder, because all of Moscow's musicians had been tapped for the funeral of Stalin, who had died at the same hour on the same day as the composer.
The Death of Juliet, after her revival and the discovery of Romeo's body, is an epilogue of heartbreaking, quiet, and ultimately soaring music.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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