Today, it is hard to believe that it took several years for the completed score of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet to make its way onto the Russian stage. At first, the ballet had been rejected even by the Bolshoi Theatre. The world premiere took place at the very end of 1938 in Czechoslovakia, in Brno, the city of Leoš Janáček, thanks to the enthusiasm of Ivo Psota, the choreographer and performer of the title part. The composer was not able to attend the premiere and did not witness the stage birth of his creation due to the tense pre-war situation.
At home, the ballet was salvaged by the Mariinsky (then Kirov) Theatre. In early 1940, the Leningrad premiere was a huge success, becoming Galina Ulanova’s glory hour. However, at that time the masterpiece’s fate literally hung by a thread again. Two weeks before the first performance, the orchestra held a meeting, which turned out rather stormy. The musicians made a decision: to avoid failure, the performance should be cancelled! A joke began to spread among the theatrical punsters: “For never was a story of more woe than this of Prokofiev and his ballet music”.
Meanwhile, the music of Romeo and Juliet had delighted audiences in concert halls long before the theatrical premiere. Three Orchestral Suites taken from the work and the Ten Pieces for Piano soon became very popular (Prokofiev himself often performed them in his piano recitals) which to a large extent contributed to the stage production of the ballet.
Iosif Raiskin
The cantata Alexander Nevsky was composed on the basis of music for the eponymous film by Sergei Eisenstein which was released in 1938. The exceptional success that accompanied the film, comparable to that of Chapaev, allowed Prokofiev to create a work independent from the film music and take it to the stage of the concert hall, changing almost nothing in it apart from several details of the orchestration.
The “picture-like” and “visible” nature of the images is one of the typical features of Prokofiev’s music in general and of this work in particular. It is as if the audience “sees” what is happening onstage, even if behind the musical impressions there is no sense of watching a cinema film. In the structure of the cantata itself one can detect features of a symphonic poem in which the first movement is a prologue and the second and third are an exposition that embodies two opposing forces: that of the Russian heroes (represented by Alexander) and that of the Order of Livonian Knights. The fourth and fifth movements form a section in which the fifth movement – the battle scene on Lake Chudskoe – is the undoubted peak and central piece of the cantata as a whole. The sixth movement is an episode of lament for fallen warriors, the only solo section (for mezzo-soprano) in the entire work. And lastly there is the seventh movement – the finale, a reprise, the celebration and triumph of the Russian warriors who are victorious.
Pavel Velikanov
A “Bogatyr’s symphony” of the present day – this was what those who wrote so fondly and without conspiring with one another called Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony following the premiere. The symphony, to which Prokofiev dedicated the summer months of 1944, was to become a “companion” to War and Peace – a grandiose operatic epic after the novel by Leo Tolstoy. On 13 January 1945 the Fifth Symphony was first performed in Moscow at a concert of Prokofiev’s music. “For me, the Fifth Symphony marks the end of a long period of my creative life,” the composer remarked, “I conceived it as a symphony of the majesty of human spirit.”
The country saluted victory; as Richter said – victory in the war and Sergei Prokofiev’s victory. In June 1945 the symphony was performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Yevgeny Mravinsky. The same year, the symphony was performed in Paris at a concert of Roger Désormière and in New York by the Boston Orchestra under Sergei Kusevitsky. “Prokofiev’s eagerly awaited symphony,” wrote the magazine Musical America, “erupted like a bomb exploding on the New York skyline.” Automatically there came a comparison of Shostakovich’s Seventh and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphonies – “symphonies of struggle and impending victory” and “symphonies of victorious celebration”. Since the times of Borodin’s symphony The Bogatyrs there had been no new work in Russian music on such a gigantic scale and of such power.
The powerful, truly bogatyr-like introduction of the symphony and the majestic and luminiferous lyricism of the first movement create an image of invincible power. This is opposed by the changeable scherzo atmosphere of the second movement: cunning and initially carefree humour becomes transformed into now an infernal dance, now something grotesque. The colourful carnival round dance is briefly shaded by the pastorale idyll of the central passage of the scherzo. The Rembrandt-like chiaroscuro can be seen in the Adagio with its gloomy, elevated recital quality of the outer sections and the sorrowful central section imbued with a sense of bitter tragedy. The finale is festive and exultant, breathing truly “public” folk merriment, and is the crown to one of Prokofiev’s most perfect works in terms of form and melodic richness.
Iosif Raiskin
