Your Guide to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet

Montagues and Capulets (Dance of the Knights) opens with a terrifying and massively dissonant chord (one that sounds like it clashes), which uses 10 of the 12 chromatic pitches (!), representing the Prince of Verona’s anger at the bloodshed caused by the rivalry between the Montagues and Capulets. The Capulet’s ball follows.

Listen out for the heavy, menacing lower brass bassline, and also the contrasting middle section in which Juliet unwillingly dances with Paris — we get the eerie sound of the celeste playing wandering notes, adding a sense of uneasiness…

Morning Dance sets the scene. It has a boisterous energy — the town is awake and the people go about their lives. But in Verona, tension is always close to the surface and the frequent changes of mood and interruptions in the music mean we can never quite relax…

The Young Juliet captures the playfulness of a girl at the outset of the story. There are bouncy pizzicato (plucked) notes in the strings, and a semiquaver (very short) rest in the ascending and descending scales creates a youthful skip. But the movement suddenly ends with Juliet’s death theme: a lonely, melancholy melody passed through solo woodwind instruments — her premonition of doom.

Masks is Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio (the Montagues) crashing the Capulet’s masked ball and going undercover… There’s stealthiness in the opening short, staccato notes as the music gradually gets louder, and all the key changes throughout the movement cause us to feel unsettled and tense.

In Friar Laurence, Romeo and Juliet visit the Friar to be secretly married. He is represented by low pitched instruments in their lower registers (the main theme is in the bassoon), which paints the gloom of his cell. We can also hear bare, parallel fifths in the strings which evokes monastic chant, or plainsong.

In the Death of Tybalt, Mercutio and Tybalt duel, neither aware of the potential consequences of their actions, until Mercutio is killed. The music is fast and frenzied.

In revenge, Romeo fights and kills Tybalt, and is then filled with horror. Heavy timpani herald a funeral procession, and a piercing cornet solo soars over the top in anguish…

Romeo at Juliet’s Grave is utterly harrowing. Romeo arrives at Juliet’s tomb, where she is still under the sleeping potion, believing her to be dead.

Reprisals of the love theme from the Balcony Scene are broken up by heavily funereal thuds from the bass drum and the timpani, and at one point the violins climb up to a startlingly high F7 note in an outpouring of grief.

Death of Juliet sees Juliet waking up in the tomb, discovering Romeo’s body beside her and deciding to follow him. The music is overwhelmingly poignant and includes an emotionally intense iteration of the death theme first heard in ‘The Young Juliet’.

It concludes in the key of C major, bringing a sense of rest and finality, and suggests that maybe the two families, united by tragedy, can also now be at peace.

Shakespeare’s tragic love story has inspired artists across the centuries with its tale of the star-struck lovers and their doomed romance. Prokofiev’s version was written after the composer returned to the Soviet Union in 1933 having spent the previous 15 years moving between the USA, Germany and Paris following the Russian Revolution. His homecoming ignited a burst of creativity, with Romeo and Juliet being composed during the summer of 1935.

The path of true love never did run smooth however, and the directors of the Bolshoi Ballet, who had commissioned the piece, were less than impressed proclaiming it ‘impossible to dance to’ — a criticism that incensed Prokofiev. He promptly extracted two suites which he used to pique others’ interest in the piece as a whole. It worked and the world premiere finally took place in the then Czechoslovakia in 1938, with the first Russian performance two years later when the Kirov Ballet performed it in Leningrad. Despite this inauspicious start, the piece has rarely been absent from either the theatre or concert stage since.