Behind the Mask: Romeo and Juliet SoNA
March 7, 2026
Walton Arts Center
Tamara Dworetz, Guest Conductor
Carnival Overture, Op. 92 (1891)
Antonín Dvořák
b September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Czech Republic
d May 1, 1904 in Prague, Czech Republic
One can make an amusing game out of classifying composers by their developmental velocity. At one end of the scale are thunderbolt
child prodigies of the Mozart and Mendelssohn stripe. Their polar opposites are those who emerge later, among whom the gold medal goes to Domenico Scarlatti, whose epochal keyboard sonatas did not start appearing until he was past 50 years old.
Dvořák was more a Scarlatti than a Mozart. Like a fine wine, he needed time to mature and develop. He was in his late thirties before his career
began to blossom, reaching its apex in the 1880s and ‘90s when he was invited to America to take over the directorship of the newly-founded National Conservatory of Music.
His Carnival Overture, Op. 92, dates from just before his American adventure. Ever the optimistic, refreshingly non-neurotic composer, Dvořák depicted in this sunny work the hubbub and high spirits of a country carnival. “Music directors will be thankful to you,” wrote Brahms to publisher Fritz Simrock in thanks for his printing the Overture – as indeed they have been thankful ever since.
Maskarade Overture (1906)
Carl Nielsen
b June 9, 1865 in Sortelung, Denmark
d October 3, 1931 in Copenhagen, Denmark
is to party like no tomorrow. “In this country where sunlight is so woefully reduced, where it is dark eleven months of the year … can a young cavalier do better than to forget for a while the swamp in which we wade and make his heart light by bathing in the cascade of dance and song and light and fire called masquerade?”
This lighter-than-air operatic confection stands proudly as the Danish national opera, by Denmark’s leading composer. Nielsen almost forgot to provide it with an overture, so he threw one together a week before the premiere. It works wonderfully nonetheless, the perfect intro to this breezy frolic that takes place mostly during a series of masked balls.
Masquerade (2013)
Anna Clyne
b March 9, 1980 in London, England
Danes spend a lot of time in the dark. Denmark is well up north, and sunny days are in short supply except for those glorious summers when it stays light for hours on end. The best way to deal with that, according to the hero of Carl Nielsen’s opera Maskarade,
18th-century Londoners loved their pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone, and Cremorne, where one could stroll for an evening, dance, dine, and seek companionship, either wholesome or otherwise, where there were
nightly open-air concerts in well-lit pavilions, elaborate masquerades, and costume balls. British composer Anna Clyne wrote this exuberant curtain-raiser for the BBC Symphony in 2013 in celebration of those pleasure gardens and their high-energy entertainment. Starting with a loud wallop, it even quotes a traditional English drinking song, “The Juice of the Barley.”
Masquerade Suite: Waltz & Galop (1944)
Aram Khachaturian
b June 6, 1903 in Tiflis, Russia
d May 1, 1978 in Moscow, USSR
Khachaturian was all over the place for a while. The 1949 MGM musical The Barkleys of Broadway drops everything while society pianist Oscar Levant blazes through the current pops favorite “Sabre Dance” at a house party so posh that the hosts apparently have a full symphony orchestra in their living room. Just about every hotfingered adolescent pianist has whirled through the Toccata, maybe continuing onwards as a young adult to the once-ubiquitous Piano Concerto. There’s even a
Khachaturian piece in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But that was then. Khachaturian’s heyday as a pops phenomenon having come and gone, it’s time for musicians to explore his catalog anew, almost a terra incognita of lightly modern, Armenian-influenced music, practically bursting with dandy stuff. Thankfully, his incidental music to Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade has never gone out of favor, a supreme example of Russian light music at its best.
Suite from Romeo and Juliet (1934–1940)
Sergei Prokofiev
b April 23, 1891 in Sontsovka, Russia
d March 5, 1953, in Moscow, USSR
On January 28, 1936 an anonymous editorial appeared in Pravda under the ominous title of “Muddle Instead of Music.” A horrifying diatribe against musical modernism –much of it in response to Dmitri Shostakovich’s racy Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District – it included a truly ominous phrase: “This game can only end badly.”
Either Joseph Stalin himself wrote the article or supervised its composition, but whatever the original source, “Muddle” stands as one of the most terrifying threats in the history of Western music. Even if the composer most directly impacted was Shostakovich, the article’s icy thrust reached far. Numerous Soviet writers, directors, choreographers, and composers shivered in its arctic blast. Among those was Adrian Piotrovsky, the original writer of the synopsis for Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. Although Prokofiev had completed his first version of the score as early as September 1935, controversies and staffing overhauls at the Bolshoi Ballet, followed by “Muddle,” meant that the first performance of the complete ballet had to wait until 1940 – but even then the choreographer made massive changes to Prokofiev’s score.
It’s hard to think of Romeo and Juliet as ever having been controversial; nowadays it seems a natural companion to the beloved Tchaikovsky ballets The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty. Like those Tchaikovsky evergreens,
Romeo and Juliet has enjoyed a second life in orchestral excerpts, either freely drawn from the score or Prokofiev’s own three suites, not to mention his Op. 75 set for solo piano.
Prokofiev may have been the enfant terrible of Russian-then-Soviet music in his early days, but by the 1930s he had mellowed considerably, allowing the compassionate and lyrical side of his compositional nature to shine through. He was still more than capable of blowing the roof off the hall with orchestral and pianistic pyrotechnics, but in Romeo and Juliet he displays a tenderness that might surprise those expecting nonstop hot licks. In fact, this is one of the most passionate and romantic scores in all ballet, permeated with a palpable love for its characters.
This program’s selections from Prokofiev’s 3 suites closely follow Shakespeare’s play, so the listener should have no difficulty following the timeless tale – the street brawl, the Capulets’ masked ball where Romeo first meets Juliet, the balcony scene, Tybalt and Mercutio’s duel, and the final tomb scene.
Program notes by Scott Foglesong, copyright 2026