As oft danced as Serge Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet has been over the last 70 years, the great Soviet composer’s original score and all of the original accompanying dances have never been performed. Yes, never, and therein lies a tale.

That changed over Independence Day weekend with the world premiere of Romeo & Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare at Bard SummerScape danced by the Mark Morris Dance Group with the American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leon Botstein.

The production is based on Prokofiev‘s original score, which was composed in 1935, and restores the original story line that he conceived with dramatist Sergei Radlov, 20 minutes of never-performed music, as well as six dance numbers choreographed by Leonid Lavrovsky of the Kirov Ballet but also never performed.

Prokofiev wrote in Autobiography that he had been focusing more on the lyrical aspects of his music and believed that a score based on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet would allow him to more fully explore this element. He composed motifs to express certain emotions, to signify the appearance of particular characters on stage, and to depict certain events. These motifs recur throughout the score and are a unifying characteristic.

Prokofiev and Radlov re-imagined the Shakespeare tragedy as the transcendence of love over oppression and ditched the traditional ending in which Juliet awakens just before Romeo poisons himself for one in which they live happily ever after.

“Prokoviev was a Christian Scientist and didn’t believe in death. So in his version, Romeo and Juliet don’t die. They go on to a new life, released from the false reality of their material being,” explains Botstein, who also is president of Bard College and one of the most erudite and funny men in classical music as we have learned through attending several seasons of the ASO’s marvelous Classics Declassified series.

Stalin decided that the masses should be exposed to the classics long denied them as Prokofiev was writing Romeo & Juliet. But the red czar’s schizophrenic cultural police soon began a crackdown on the arts and were outraged at the ballet’s nonconformist ending, which they declared was undemocratic. There also were complaints by the Kirov’s dancers that some of the choreography was too difficult and too discordant. The premiere production was canceled and the composer was sent back to the drawing board. What emerged at the 1940 premiere and has been performed ever since was different in key respects.

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