Night and day they roam about.”
V. Burial of Kije. (Andante assai.) Thus ends the paper career of our valiant hero. The music recalls his birth to a flourish of military sounds, his romance, his wedding. And now the cornet that had blithely announced his coming in an off-stage fanfare is muted to his going, as Lieutenant Kije dwindles to his final silence.
Music for the Ballet, “Romeo and Juliet,” Opus 64-A and 64-B
As a ballet in four acts and nine tableaux, Prokofieff’s “Romeo and Juliet” was first produced by the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1935. Like many standard Russian ballets, the performance took a whole evening. Prokofieff assembled two Suites from the music, the first premiered in Moscow on November 24, 1936, under the direction of Nicolas Semjonowitsch Golowanow. The premiere of the second suite followed less than a month later.
Prokofieff himself directed the American premieres of both Suites, of Suite No. 1 as guest of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on January 21, 1937, and of Suite No. 2 as guest of the Boston Symphony Orchestra on March 25, 1938. Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston unit introduced the Suite to New York on March 31 following.
After a trial performance of the ballet in Moscow V. V. Konin reported to the “Musical Courier” that Soviet critics present were “left in dismay at the awkward incongruity between the realistic idiom of the musical language, a language which successfully characterizes the individualism of the Shakespearean images, and the blind submission to the worst traditions of the old form, as revealed in the libretto.”
Fault was also found because “the social atmosphere of the period and the natural evolution of its tragic elements had been robbed of their logical culmination and brought to the ridiculously dissonant ‘happy end’ of the conventional ballet. This inconsistency in the development of the libretto has had an unfortunate effect, not only upon the general structure, but even upon the otherwise excellent musical score.”
Critical reaction to both Suites has varied, some reviewers finding the music dry and insipid for such a romantic theme; others hailing its pungency and color. Prokofieff’s classicism was compared with his romanticism. If we are prepared to accept the “Classical” Symphony as truly classical, said one critic, then we must accept the “Romeo and Juliet” music as truly romantic. The cold, cheerless, dreary music “is certainly not love music,” read one verdict. Prokofieff was taken to task for describing a love story “as if it were an algebraic problem.”
Said Olin Downes of “The New York Times” in his review of the Boston Symphony concert of March 31, 1938:—“The music is predominantly satirical.... There is the partial suggestion of that which is poignant and tragic, but there is little of the sensuous or emotional, and in the main the music could bear almost any title and still serve the ballet evolutions and have nothing to do with Romeo and Juliet.”
Others extolled Prokofieff for the “fundamental simplicity and buoyancy” of the music, finding it typically rooted in the “plane, tangible realities of tone, design, and color.” Prokofieff himself answered the repeated charge that his score lacked feeling and melody:—