Menuhin Recommends... Romeo and Juliet by Sergei Prokofiev

‘Two households, both alike in dignity...’ 

There are few pieces of music that can make a concert hall feel simultaneously enormous and intimate. Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet can. 

By 1934, Prokofiev’s world was shrinking. Once a cultural ambassador with considerable artistic freedom, he was increasingly confronted by a Soviet system demanding ideological conformity over artistic innovation. Meanwhile, the Depression and economic uncertainty across Europe made life abroad increasingly difficult. Slowly, commission by commission, Prokofiev was drawn back towards the country he had left. 

There is a long tradition in Russian culture of using fantastical, satirical and historical narratives to explore tensions that could not always be confronted directly. Romeo and Juliet offered Prokofiev another world through which to do so. 

Shakespeare’s words disappear, translated instead into the universal language of ballet. Yet remarkably little is lost. 

Take Juliet as a Young Girl. Early in Act One, Prokofiev teases us with a musical gingerbread house of semiquaver flurries and cascading chords, before the music dissolves into a Debussy-like world of blooming arpeggios and fragments. It is the first time we encounter Juliet, yet already we sense how layered she is. 

The real masterclass, however, arrives with the Dance of the Knights. There has always been something uneasy about Prokofiev’s sound world, as though at any moment the mask might drop. Here, it does. 

Aggressive, pulsating brass becomes the piano’s left hand, while the imposing theme emerges above it: a violent, testosterone-fuelled clash between the Montagues and Capulets. After a rousing horn section, the theme returns before the music drives into its development. 

And then, in the middle of all this, our heroes meet. It is as though time stops. The pounding bass line dissolves, and suddenly scale-like, dancing figures take over. Two people, rather than two houses. The enormous world Prokofiev has built around them seems to shrink. 

The irony is difficult to miss. Dance of the Knights would become by far the most recognisable music from the ballet, escaping the confines of Shakespeare’s Verona and taking on a life of its own. But behind the music was a composer increasingly aware of the limits placed upon him.  

Romeo and Juliet itself did not take a straightforward path to the stage. Prokofiev substantially revised the work and even experimented with an alternative ending in which the lovers survived. The ballet eventually reached the stage in its tragic form in 1940. 

By then, Prokofiev had committed himself to a remarkable contradiction: he had returned to the country he loved, only to find the conditions of belonging becoming increasingly restrictive. 

And the worst was still to come. After the Second World War, Soviet authorities renewed their attack on artistic work that failed to conform to ideological expectations. In 1948, Prokofiev was officially denounced alongside composers including Shostakovich and Khachaturian for music deemed insufficiently ideological and excessively influenced by the West. 

Perhaps, with hindsight, Romeo and Juliet gains something. It isn’t a coded political manifesto. It doesn’t need to be. It is a story about two young people attempting to exist outside a world defined by inherited conflict, authority and social expectation. 

And Prokofiev, writing it while negotiating his own return to an increasingly controlled society, knew something about the desire to escape a world that had already decided what you were supposed to be. Nearly ninety years later, that tension remains. The words may be gone, but the music still speaks. 

Hear leading Welsh pianist Llŷr Williams bring this extraordinary music to life in his Menuhin Hall debut, in a recital spanning the late Romantic and early 20th-century repertoire: https://www.menuhinhall.co.uk/events/llyr-williams