Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet

When Jean Sibelius composed Finlandia in 1899, his homeland was embroiled in a national identity crisis. The Grand Duchy of Finland, established 90 years earlier as an autonomous state within the Russian Empire, had been struggling with an increase in Russian influence, especially after Tsar Nicholas II assumed power in 1894. Nicholas’s infamous February Manifesto of 1899 essentially stripped away any remaining semblance of Finnish autonomy — a move that, to Finns, amounted to a coup d’état and a violation of their constitutional rights. Not surprisingly, this sparked outrage among the Finnish population, and ultimately galvanized citizens to reclaim their political freedom and assert an independent national identity.

One such effort took place in November 1899 with the Press Celebrations, a three-day pageant and thinly veiled political protest masked as a pension fundraiser for censored Finnish journalists. The festival featured speeches, historical tableaux, and music to inspire national unity and rally for Finnish sovereignty. One of the highlights came from Sibelius, who was commissioned to write incidental music for six tableaux depicting Finnish history and mythology. The last of these tableaux, a tone poem entitled Finland Awakes, covertly portrayed the Finnish struggle against oppression and was eventually renamed Finlandia.

Heard in this context, the music of Finlandia comes alive as a vivid narrative of Finland’s struggle for independence. The opening notes are dark, tense, and oppressive, hovering in the lower registers of the orchestra, depicting a Finland crushed under the suffocating presence of Nicholas’s tsarist state. These opening measures offer only passing glimmers of relief. Joining in the search for peace, a pleading melody in the high woodwinds gives us the first vague notion of hope, predicting the serenity and stability that is to come. The rest of orchestra soon elaborates on the folklike melody, as if Finland itself is finding its voice from under the shadows.

Before fulfillment can come, however, a storm overtakes the orchestra. Churning violins and violas, low string tremolos, and tight punctuations from the brass roil together in a dramatic scene that upends any sense of forward momentum. But soon the storm breaks, and the orchestra is unified in a rousing military-style march, exemplifying solidarity in the fight for Finnish independence. The stormy brass punctuations now form the rhythmic basis of the march — along with the percussion section — the strings and woodwinds taking up the melodic call-to-action. The storm briefly reemerges, threatening to dominate the orchestra, before the entire scene gives way to reprieve.

The earlier upper-woodwind plea is now answered in the emotional climax of the work. This serene melody, now recognized as the “Finlandia hymn,” comes across much like a folk tune, and is often mistaken for one. The tune resonated deeply with the Finnish people and many variations of sung text have been appended to it retroactively (including the Christian hymn “Be Still, My Soul”). There have even been campaigns over the years to formally recognize the Finlandia hymn as Finland’s national anthem.

Regardless of its official standing, the hymn section of the work sends a clear message: Finland is indeed awake, and there is hope on the horizon. This sentiment is solidified as the march returns, now triumphant in the context of the preceding hymn section — a definitive statement that Finland has a voice of its own and will someday be free.

Of course, when Finlandia premiered at the Press Celebrations, the true implications of the work were masked, like those of the festival itself. Beneath the surface, Finlandia was a testament to the strength, resilience, and optimism of the Finnish people under Russian rule, even if it could not be stated as such in 1899. But these efforts ultimately paid off as Nicholas II repealed the February Manifesto in 1905, and when Finland declared its independence from Russia in 1917. Peace did not come immediately, though, and the struggle for stability persisted through the Finnish Civil War and World War I. Yet over time, the nation was able to unify and eventually became a stable, prosperous, sovereign state with its own rich cultural voice. In the decades following, thanks to the impact of his music on Finland’s fight for freedom, Sibelius became a symbol of Finland's culture and identity — an icon of Finnish resilience and spirit.

— Kevin Whitman

Kevin Whitman is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Marketing Operations Manager.

“I’ve got some lovely themes for a violin concerto,” Jean Sibelius wrote to his wife, Aino, in September 1902. The Finnish composer, already a national figure and the recipient of an annual

pension from the Finnish government at 37, had been asked by the celebrated German violinist Willy Burmester to write a concerto. Despite the “lovely themes” Sibelius had in mind, the concerto wasn’t coming along as expected. The difficulties had mostly to do with the composer’s alcoholism, which around this time began to alarm his family. It was a year before Sibelius sent the piano score to Burmester, who responded enthusiastically: “I can only say one thing: Wonderful! Masterly! Only once before have I spoken in such terms of a composer, and that was when Tchaikovsky showed me his concerto.”

But plans did not unfold as anticipated. Burmester was expecting to play the world premiere of the new work in spring 1904, but Sibelius, for financial reasons, pushed for an earlier date even though Burmester wasn’t available (and the orchestration of the concerto wasn’t finished). Sibelius completed the concerto before the end of 1903 and gave it to a local violin teacher, Victor Nováček, to perform. By all accounts, Nováček was hardly more than a mediocre player. Leading Sibelius biographer Erik Tawaststjerna writes that at the Helsinki premiere, “A red-faced and perspiring Nováček fought a losing battle with a solo part that bristled with even greater difficulties in this first version than it does in the definitive score.”

The poor first performance aside, Sibelius was still dissatisfied with the work and decided to revise it entirely. The definitive version premiered with Karl Halíř as soloist, but the work was ultimately dedicated to an exceptionally gifted 17-year-old Hungarian named Ferenc Vecsey, who would become the work’s first champion, performing it internationally, including its first presentations in Cleveland.

Written in the first years of the 20th century, Sibelius’s concerto looks back to the great Romantic concertos of the 19th. The opening of the first movement, with the orchestral violins playing tremolos as the soloist plays a wistful melody above, is unabashedly old-fashioned. The only unconventional features are the repeated leaps, which create harsher sonorities, and the irregular phrase structure of the theme, which makes it difficult to predict how the melody is going to evolve.

Simple and songlike at first, the violin part gradually becomes more and more agitated. The orchestra eventually introduces a second idea, which the violin soon takes over. This is followed by a third, purely orchestral section, lively and energetic. There is no traditional development section in the first movement; its place is taken by a cadenza, which occurs in the middle of the movement rather than at the more customary position near the end.

The second movement is based on the combination of two themes, one played by the two clarinets at the beginning, the other by the solo violin a few measures later. The violin melody is, according to the composer, “sonorous and expressive.” The clarinet theme later grows into an impassioned middle section whose dynamism carries over into the recapitulation of the violin melody. Only at the very end does the melody find its initial peace and tranquility again.

Speaking about the third-movement finale, it is impossible to resist quoting Donald Francis Tovey’s characterization as a “polonaise for polar bears.” Tovey’s words capture the singular combination of elegant dance rhythms and a certain heavy-footedness felt at the beginning of this movement. Again, there are two themes, one in a polonaise rhythm and one based on the alternation of 6/8 and 3/4 time. “With this,” Tovey concludes, “we can safely leave the finale to dance the listener into Finland, or what-ever Fairyland Sibelius will have us attain.”

— adapted from a note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.

After 15 years away from Russia, spent mostly in France and the United States, Sergei Prokofiev felt a complicated urge to return to his homeland in the mid-1930s. Just how much he really understood the Soviet system that had replaced the Russian monarchy he had grown up in is a vexed question. Even if he knew that the liberal, post-Revolution attitude toward the arts had diminished, he could not be blamed for failing to foresee the horrors of Stalin’s dictatorship. By 1936, when Prokofiev’s family finally settled in Moscow, the signs of harsh times ahead were clear, but in 1933 he was still accepting commissions from his homeland, with good prospects for more.

The Kirov Theater in Leningrad wanted a new ballet from Prokofiev, recognizing the success of his Paris ballets The Steel Step, The Prodigal Son, and On the Dnieper. Prokofiev suggested Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as the new ballet’s storyline. The Kirov was unhappy with the proposal, so Prokofiev instead signed a contract with Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. Moscow also had some difficulties with details, thinking it improbable that the dying lovers could be seen dancing at the ballet’s conclusion. A happy ending was the first solution, and with this unlikely dénouement, the score was completed in the summer of 1935. However, this product was ultimately rejected by the Moscow theater, too.

With no immediate prospect of a staged performance, Prokofiev revised the work and made two seven-movement orchestral suites and a 10-movement piano suite from the ballet’s 52 numbers. The ballet was eventually staged for the first time in Brno in 1938 and quickly became a triumph around the world.

Though covering only a portion of the plot, Suite No. 2 from Prokofiev’s full ballet score can be enjoyed purely in musical terms, setting the scene for the Shakespearean drama that is to unfold. The suite opens in the hustle and bustle of the Capulets’ ball, where the swaggering, proud knights and gentler ladies can be heard in “Montagues and Capulets”. Meanwhile, Juliet is upstairs, teasing her nurse. But this coquettish character has a tender side, as other melodies in “Juliet, the Young Girl” reveal.

Clerical and dignified, “Friar Laurence” provides a welcome reprieve from the sweaty dance hall, offering a particularly notable role for the bassoon. We are then suddenly thrust out onto the street, where a lively “Dance” — filled with Prokofiev’s roguish melodic and harmonic tricks — is in full swing.

The scene shifts yet again to focus on the intimate world of the star-crossed lovers. The longest movement of the suite, “Romeo and Juliet Before Parting” contains some of the ballet’s most heart-rending music, as the two share a tender moment together before bidding farewell — for the final time. The suite, as the play, closes on an interior note: “Dance of the Maids from the Antilles” offers a gentle reprieve before the poignance of penultimate scene, where Romeo, thinking Juliet dead, dances with her immobile body, mere moments before the lovers’ tragic fate is sealed.

— adapted from a note by Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.