Sergei Prokofiev (1891 - 1953)
Romeo & Juliet

Sergei Prokofiev wrote several ballets during his composing career, but none has achieved the fame of his wonderful Romeo and Juliet. For many people this is simply the best ballet ever written. The lyrical beauty and tragic power are simply overwhelming.

Prokofiev wrote the score for Romeo and Juliet in about 1935, to a commission by the Bolshoi Theatre of Moscow. But the directors of the Bolshoi, finding the music "not suitable for dancing" cancelled the contract. Prokofiev had given the tragic story a happy ending. Romeo arrives at Juliet's tomb in time to find her alive and everything ended well. When challenged on this (even the Soviet critics of the day were unimpressed by this piece of tampering!) Prokofiev's memorable reply was "Dead men can't dance, live men can". But after discussing the problem with his choreographers, Prokofiev worked out a way of ending the ballet in accord with Shakespeare's tragedy, and rewrote the closing music expressing the tragedy in dance.

Since the Bolshoi had cancelled the commission, Prokofiev was concerned that the music would never be heard. So he extracted two concert suites from it, which received several performances around the world, while the whole ballet still awaited a premiere. The first full performance was in Brno, in Czechoslovakia in 1938 (a fact that Prokofiev's Soviet biographers preferred to ignore!). The first Russian performance was by the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad in 1940, but it did not reach the Bolshoi in Moscow who had first commissioned it - until a production in 1946. Prokofiev enhanced the orchestration for the Kirov production, adding some extra instruments to help the sound in the bigger spaces of the Leningrad theatre.