Friday Performance Pick – 117

Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet “Dance of the Knights”

romeo-juliet
Sir John Gilbert, Capulets and Montagues

This post is scheduled to appear when I’m somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. If you hang around Professor Carol, as I do on a regular basis, you will find yourself in some interesting places. I remember thinking something like that when I found myself in Russia for the first time. That trip included attending a performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet at the Mariinsky (Kirov) Theater in St. Petersburg. While Russia was new for me, Carol was chatting with her old buds in the orchestra during intermission.

The ballet is perhaps best known for the “Dance of the Knights,” which occurs at the Ball Scene. Its ponderous rhythm and hard edges capture the arrogance and tensions between the Capulets and Montagues. This link will take you directly to the ball. If you have the time to explore the entire ballet at that link, you would find it worth your while.

Prokofiev wrote Romeo and Juliet in 1935, at about the time he decided to return to his native Russia. He had left Russia for America in 1918 shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution and moved later to Paris. In his years in the West, he composed and toured as a concert pianist. His return to Russia was apparently driven by homesickness and accompanied by political naïveté. He explained:

Here I have to kow-tow to publishers, managers, committees, sponsors of productions, patronesses of art, and conductors each time I wish my work to be performed. A composer doesn’t have to do that in Russia. And as for ‘politics’, they don’t concern me. It is none of my business.

But if Prokofiev shunned politics, politics did not shun Prokofiev. Shortly after the move, Stalin’s Great Terror (1936-1938) began. Prokofiev would live out his life in the Soviet Union, dying on the same day as Stalin in 1953.