The most dramatic number in Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet is “Montagues and Capulets,” a sequence of fateful, shattering discords, and hushed, romantic string sounds, followed by a bumptious depiction of Romeo and his friends crashing the Capulet ball. This unusual juxtaposition mirrors the essence of Romeo and Juliet, which is by turns brash, lyrical, and witty, with plenty of passion, but also shot through with Prokofiev’s acrid irreverence. This complexity is an admirable rendering of Shakespeare’s vision of young love assaulted by harsh reality, but for years it confused the critics, who judged it too “cold” to be proper love music. (Olin Downes of The New York Times wrote in 1938, “There is the partial suggestion of that which is poignant and tragic, but there is little of the sensuous or emotional.”)
Today, Romeo and Juliet is one of Prokofiev’s most popular scores (indeed, it was always popular with audiences, if not critics—a classic case of the former being ahead of the latter), but its initial history was as star-crossed as Shakespeare’s lovers. Beginning in 1934, Prokofiev fought for six years to get his “undanceable” ballet produced in Russia, succeeding only after mounting an unusual public relations campaign in which he performed piano and orchestral excerpts in Europe and America.
As a ballet, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is necessarily more sectional and specific than Tchaikovsky’s fantasy-overture or Berlioz’s symphonie dramatique adaptations. Nevertheless, like Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, it is very much a “symphonic ballet” that works wonderfully as concert music. The dramatic structure consists of an elaborate tissue of motifs representing not only specific characters but their thoughts and fantasies, sometimes crisscrossing or coalescing—a technique inaugurated by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
The music for this massive score exhibits a variety of Prokofiev’s styles beyond his predominant Romantic mode from this late period. The strutting pomposity of “Montagues and Capulets” recalls the barbaric and satiric aspects of an earlier Prokofiev. Delectable touches of his neoclassical period are also evident in the clear lines of “Juliet as a Young Girl” and “Masks.”
The heart of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is, as it was for Tchaikovsky and Berlioz, the balcony scene, with its heavenly succession of each lover’s motif blossoming into long-breathed melodies, along with a new motif that represents their passion. Prokofiev was understandably astonished by the critics’ charge that even this work lacked emotion: “If people find no melody and no emotion in this work,” he wrote, “I shall be very sorry.”
A rather scary footnote to the tortured history of this score involves the near decision to please the dancers by changing Shakespeare’s tragic ending to a happy one. (In this version, Romeo would arrive a minute earlier and find Juliet alive.) Prokofiev nearly bought into this “bit of barbarism,” as he later called it, rationalizing the change with the odd conclusion that Shakespeare himself wasn’t certain about the ending of the tragic King Lear (actually, it was 18th- and 19th-century censors who created Lear’s “happy” ending, not Shakespeare), and the even odder leap that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet during the same period as the The Two Gentlemen of Verona—and since that story had a happy ending, why couldn’t Romeo and Juliet? What finally made Prokofiev come to his senses was not a regard for Shakespeare’s text, but an offhand remark someone made to the composer. “Strictly speaking,” this unnamed person said, “your music does not express any real joy at the end.” Prokofiev admitted that this “was quite true” and decided to leave the ending alone. As usual, his artistic impulses proved wiser than his political ones.
Speculation that Tchaikovsky did not die of cholera, as officially reported, but committed suicide to avoid exposure as a gay man, gives his final symphony a dark and compelling twist. “As regards the suicide story,” music critic James Huneker wrote as far back as 1899, “while it has been officially denied, it has never been quite discredited.” Eighty years later, an ugly account—one given the authority of the 1980 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians—emerged, suggesting that the longstanding claim that Tchaikovsky died of cholera was indeed a cover-up. Tchaikovsky, these reports claim, voluntarily took poison after being blackmailed by a St. Petersburg law tribunal, which hauled him into a secret meeting and demanded his death: The secret “It” alluded to in the Fifth Symphony, the force of “Fate” that haunted his life, finally ended it. Whether or not one chooses to believe this still-disputed story, it is given a kind of artistic credence in Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique,” written just before these events are alleged to have occurred, a work that often sounds like the musical equivalent of despair.
Tchaikovsky called this his most “sincere” symphony, and indeed it brought a new emotional honesty to music. The gloom of the outer movements—made all the more convincing by the groping toward light in the inner ones—is gripping and emotionally real. The darkness of this symphony (dubbed the “Pathétique” by Tchaikovsky’s brother) looks forward to desolate moments in Mahler, Shostakovich, and others, yet the work carries a feeling of profound isolation. In Lawrence Gilman’s words, it remains “a lonely and towering masterpiece. Where, indeed, is there anything at all like it?”
Part of the power of the “Pathétique” comes from Tchaikovsky’s decision to conclude the work not with a desperate life-affirmation, as he’d done in his two previous symphonies, but with defeat and resignation, a completion of the tragic gesture rather than a defiance of it. After a poignant first movement with a shattering development section, a bittersweet waltz that initially puzzled critics with its emotional subtlety, and a manic, explosive march, Tchaikovsky brings the symphony down with an Adagio lamentoso where, in Huneker’s words, “an atmosphere of grief, immutable, eternal, hovers about like a huge black-winged angel.” The most famous melody, one unmistakably Tchaikovskian, is the long second subject in the first movement, which seems to sum up the heartbreak this composer poured into his life’s work.
Yet the immediate period during which this symphony was composed was—at least for Tchaikovsky—a relatively happy one. He was alone in a secluded village called Klin, the kind of isolated natural setting he found congenial. He later told his nephew that he often “wept bitterly” while writing, but this was apparently because the “deeply subjective” symphony was going well.
This is not to say that Tchaikovsky had conquered his usual difficulties. He was still afflicted with self-doubts that often left him “staring all day at two pages,” and when he conducted the premiere of the new symphony in October 1893, he was convinced that the orchestra was “bored” by the work. Indeed, he harbored such intense doubts about the finale—possibly his most powerful and original symphonic movement—that he pondered destroying it. Typical of Tchaikovsky’s bad luck, the symphony was received coolly at its premiere, but was enthusiastically embraced at subsequent performances a month later—right after his sudden, tragic death.
Perhaps the most astonishing fact about the “Pathétique,” Tchaikovsky’s monument to negation, is that it was composed only one year after The Nutcracker, his most enchanting, life-affirming work. (In fact, he was in a far more troubled mood when he wrote the ballet than when he composed the symphony.) The confluence of these two pieces is a testament not only to Tchaikovsky’s emotional range, but to the complexity of the human psyche and the mystery of the creative process.