The Tortured History Behind Prokofiev's 'Romeo and Juliet'

The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Stéphane Denève, will perform selections this Thursday through Saturday. New York City Ballet dances Peter Martins’ staging from Feb. 13 to 23.

But the celebrated legacy of “Romeo and Juliet” belies its tortured history: It left Prokofiev broken and emerged from a period that left many of his colleagues dead.

When Prokofiev accepted the commission from the Kirov (now Mariinsky) Theater, he had lived outside Russia since 1918 and saw the offer as a kind of homecoming. It could also be his moment to dethrone Shostakovich following the disastrous premiere of his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” which was mocked by Stalin and denounced in the Communist newspaper Pravda.

With friends, Prokofiev came up with the idea for a ballet adaptation of Shakespeare, after considering “Tristan und Isolde” (but deciding he couldn’t contend with Wagner) and “Pelléas et Mélisande” (feeling the same about Debussy). Then he spent a summer at the artists’ retreat Polenovo, writing a complete annotated piano score in just four months.

“This ballet was conceived in paradise,” Simon Morrison, a music professor at Princeton University and the author of “The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years,” said in an interview. “Prokofiev was about to create this astonishing diversity of music from his own imagination.”

Still, the ballet was idiosyncratic to a fault. In its original form, it included a Victory Day parade plopped in the middle of the plot. And the divertissements, a parade of showcase dances that are a staple of classical ballet, were inserted right after Juliet takes the potion: “the worst possible moment,” Morrison said.

But the most unconventional decision Prokofiev made was in the ending: It was happy.

According to the ballet’s original scenario, by Adrian Piotrovsky, Romeo wants to stab himself but is stopped by Friar Laurence. While they are entangled in a struggle, Juliet begins to breathe. Then the stage fills with people, who watch as Romeo and Juliet begin to dance. The music is bright as the young lovers leave the stage in an Orphic apotheosis.

In 1936, Prokofiev played the first three acts on piano for a small group that included the Shakespeare scholar Sergei Dinamov, who supported the unusual ending. The Bolshoi, under the leadership of Vladimir Mutnikh, acquired “Romeo” from the Kirov and planned to stage it during the 1936-37 season.

Then the dominoes began to fall. Platon Kerzhentsev, chairman of the newly formed Committee on Arts Affairs, took charge of the Bolshoi and called for a state assessment of the repertoire. “Romeo” was postponed, and Mutnikh was arrested as part of Stalin’s Great Purge, in which more than 1 million people were detained and at least 600,000 were executed. Among the victims were Piotrovsky and Dinamov.

“With this increasingly paranoid cultural edifice, anything associated with Mutnikh was inevitably tainted,” Morrison said. “So this ballet project was essentially doomed.”

When “Romeo” finally made its way to the Russian stage, it was back at the Kirov, as part of its 1939-40 season. But the orchestration had been heavily altered — new instruments, and divisi lines added to the violin parts — and the ending was rewritten to be tragic, a tradition that continues with most stagings today.

Whole numbers were excised, though Prokofiev was able to salvage some of the divertissements elsewhere in the score. And he repurposed a scherzo passage in his Fifth Symphony, written during World War II.

Some of the changes were made without Prokofiev’s permission. When he was involved, it was with reluctance.

“The creative tumult of that period was absolutely staggering,” Morrison said. “People in his apartment building were disappearing, he couldn’t leave and his ballet was effectively censored. I think at this moment something really did break in him.”

It was clear to Prokofiev that his return to Russia had been a colossal mistake. But he would remain there for the rest of his life, with ups and downs of creativity and fame and near-constant health problems.

If he had any consolation, it was in the “Romeo” orchestral suites, the first two of which had their premiere before the ballet itself. These are the score as Prokofiev intended it: light and buoyant. Their earliest performances apparently inspired Shostakovich, whose Sixth Symphony (1939) uses a motif taken from “Romeo.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.