Sergei Prokoviev
Prokoviev’s music for ballet spans his career from 1915 until his death in 1953. He worked with Diaghilev’s famous Ballets Russes who commissioned him to compose a number of ballets.
The first Soviet Russian performance of Romeo and Juliet was given at the Kirov Theatre in 1940. before the first performance there was conflict between the choreographer Leonid Lavrosky and Prokoviev. The dancers didn’t understand the music and the orchestra tried to cancel the show.
Despite these problems the ballet was well received and has been popular ever since.
The score for Romeo and Juliet has a very strong structure based upon the original libretto (script). This has presented choreographers with a very clear blueprint to follow, or perhaps for some too many restrictions and not enough freedom to inject their own ideas.
The story ends tragically with the deaths of both Romeo and Juliet, but the ending caused problems also for the composer. In his autobiography Prokoviev writes:
“There was quite a fuss at the time about our attempts to give Romeo and Juliet a happy ending- in the last act Romeo arrives a minute earlier, finds Juliet alive and everything ends well. The reasons for this bit of barbarism were purely choreographic: living people can dance, the dying cannot….. But what really caused me to change my mind about the whole thing was a remark someone made to me about the ballet: ‘Strictly speaking, your music does not express any real joy at the end.’ That was quite true. After several conferences with the choreographers, it was found that the tragic ending could be expressed in dance and in due time the music for that ending was written.”
Focus Questions:
- Look at the final crypt scene. How does the choreographer solve the problem of dying people having to dance?
- What is the relationship between the music and the dance in this final scene?
- Is the scene successfully realized? Would you choreograph it differently? If so, how?