Romeo and Juliet (1938)

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Limelight · Ballet

Romeo and Juliet (1938)

Choreography by Leonid Lavrovsky

This is Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64, composed in 1935 to a scenario by Adrian Piotrovsky and Sergey Radlov and best known today in the choreography Leonid Lavrovsky made for the Kirov Theatre. The score's tangled path to the stage — a rejected happy ending, a shelved Bolshoi contract, a first full staging abroad, and only then the Leningrad production that became canonical — makes this one of the clearest cases in the twentieth-century repertoire of a ballet's choreographic identity being fixed years after its music was finished.

Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet (Full Ballet) - Lavrovsky, Bessmertnova, Bolshoi 1976Full performance · Bolshoi Ballet · 144 min · on AdmiralSilver96

What is danced

The article gives almost no direct description of steps or technique; it is a composition and production history, not a synopsis. What can be drawn from it is indirect: the numbered movements Prokofiev extracted into suites and a piano set point to the shape of the danced action — a folk dance and street-awakening scene, a Minuet for the arrival of guests, a masked-ball sequence, a balcony pas de deux ('Romeo and Juliet — Balcony Scene and Love Dance'), a duel culminating in the 'Death of Tybalt', Juliet's solo variation, a parting scene for the lovers, and a tomb scene. These titles describe musical content reused in concert suites and 'do not always correspond exactly' to the numbers in the complete ballet, so they should be read as indicative of scene-type, not as a reliable map of the stage action.

Context

The scenario was written to the precepts of 'drambalet' — dramatised ballet, promoted at the Kirov specifically to replace works built on 'choreographic display and innovation' with dance subordinated to psychological narrative. Prokofiev and his librettists' original tragicomic compromise (a happy ending, against Shakespeare) fell foul of Soviet cultural officials under Platon Kerzhentsev, and the ballet's Soviet staging was delayed for years, compounded by the fallout from the 1936 Pravda denunciation of Shostakovich that also touched Piotrovsky. The work therefore reached the stage first outside the USSR, in a truncated single-act Brno production in 1938, before Lavrovsky's fuller Leningrad version fixed the choreographic and narrative shape — restoring the tragic ending — that most later stagings inherit.

Staging history

The complete ballet's actual theatrical premiere, per the article, was in Brno on 30 December 1938, a single-act staging drawing mainly on the first two suites; the article does not name that production's choreographer. Lavrovsky's now-standard version followed on 11 January 1940 at the Kirov with Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev, won the Stalin Prize, and was filmed by Mosfilm in 1955. From there the ballet became one of the most re-choreographed narrative works in the repertoire: Ashton (Royal Danish Ballet, 1955), Cranko (Stuttgart, 1962), MacMillan (Royal Ballet, 1965, with Fonteyn and Nureyev), Neumeier (Frankfurt/Hamburg, 1971/74), Nureyev (London Festival Ballet, 1977), Grigorovich (Bolshoi, 1979), Seregi (Budapest, 1985), Gable/Moricone (Northern Ballet, 1991), Maillot (Monte Carlo, 1996), Martins (NYCB, 2007), Pastor (Scottish Ballet, 2008) and Mark Morris, who in 2008 choreographed the reconstructed 1935 original score unearthed by Simon Morrison, followed by Ratmansky (National Ballet of Canada, 2011), Murphy (Australian Ballet, 2011), Welch (Houston Ballet, 2015) and Bourne (an asylum-set adaptation, 2019).

How to watch it

Because the same music has supported such different choreographic readings, watch for how a given production handles the balcony and bedroom-parting duets (lyric classical partnering) against the crowd and duel scenes (Dance of the Knights, Death of Tybalt), where mass ensemble work and mimed confrontation carry the drama. In Lavrovsky's drambalet lineage, expect pantomime integrated with classical vocabulary rather than danced-for-its-own-sake display; later versions (Grigorovich, Neumeier, Maillot, Bourne) each recast that balance differently, so the same numbered scenes can look markedly unlike each other from company to company.

Credits

  • composer: Sergei Prokofiev

More from Sergei Prokofiev

Other staged works in the register connected to this one by author or lineage.

Questions

Did Romeo and Juliet premiere in 1938 or 1940?
The article gives both: the full ballet's first staging was in Brno on 30 December 1938, in a single-act version using mostly the first two suites, with no choreographer named. The Lavrovsky choreography now considered definitive premiered later, on 11 January 1940, at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad.
Why did Prokofiev's original version have a happy ending?
The 1935 scenario by Piotrovsky and Radlov departed from Shakespeare with a happy ending, which provoked objections from Soviet cultural officials and contributed to the ballet's staging being postponed for years until conductor Yuri Fayer urged Prokofiev to restore the tragic ending.
Which choreographic version is most widely performed today?
The article does not rank them, but lists Lavrovsky's 1940 Kirov version as the one 'better known today', alongside later staples still in active repertory such as Cranko's (Stuttgart), MacMillan's (Royal Ballet), Nureyev's (English National Ballet) and Grigorovich's (Bolshoi).
What makes the orchestration distinctive?
Prokofiev added tenor saxophone (used both solo and in the ensemble), cornet, viola d'amore and mandolins to a largely standard orchestra, giving the score an Italianate colour.
This entry was written from “Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev)” on English Wikipedia (revision 1366270213), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The link points at the exact revision this text was written from, so it shows the words we actually used rather than whatever the article says today. Credits and premiere data come from Wikidata (CC0), cited per field.
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