Romeo And Juliet (ballet), Op.64 by Sergei Prokofiev
Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64, is Sergei Prokofiev's ballet after Shakespeare, first composed in 1935 and given its Soviet stage premiere at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad on 11 January 1940, with choreography by Leonid Lavrovsky. The libretto came from Adrian Piotrovsky, Sergei Radlov, Lavrovsky and the composer himself. The road to the stage was long. The score was first written for the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and its original ending, in which the lovers live, provoked controversy among Soviet cultural officials; the production was postponed indefinitely. Suites of the music were heard in Moscow and the United States, and the ballet was first staged in Brno, then in Czechoslovakia, on 30 December 1938, in a single-act version drawn mostly from the first two suites. The work reached a Soviet stage only when he and Lavrovsky agreed to let the lovers die, in a significantly revised version. Prokofiev drew three orchestral suites from the ballet, and in 1937 he made a set of ten piano pieces from it, Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 75. One number, the Dance of the Knights, marked Allegro pesante, appears in the Montagues and Capulets movement of the second suite. The complete ballet is a long evening, more than three hours with two intervals at the Mariinsky, and the same score has since carried many different stagings.
O Romeo And Juliet (ballet), Op.64
Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64, is Sergei Prokofiev's ballet after Shakespeare, first composed in 1935 and given its Soviet stage premiere at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad on 11 January 1940, with choreography by Leonid Lavrovsky. The libretto came from Adrian Piotrovsky, Sergei Radlov, Lavrovsky and the composer himself.
The road to the stage was long. The score was first written for the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and its original ending, in which the lovers live, provoked controversy among Soviet cultural officials; the production was postponed indefinitely. Suites of the music were heard in Moscow and the United States, and the ballet was first staged in Brno, then in Czechoslovakia, on 30 December 1938, in a single-act version drawn mostly from the first two suites. The work reached a Soviet stage only when he and Lavrovsky agreed to let the lovers die, in a significantly revised version.
Prokofiev drew three orchestral suites from the ballet, and in 1937 he made a set of ten piano pieces from it, Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 75. One number, the Dance of the Knights, marked Allegro pesante, appears in the Montagues and Capulets movement of the second suite. The complete ballet is a long evening, more than three hours with two intervals at the Mariinsky, and the same score has since carried many different stagings.