Suite No. 2 from Romeo and Juliet

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.