Prokofiev completed the ballet’s piano part on September 8^th 1935, but in June he contracted with the Moscow Composers’ Union to make two suites from the material of Romeo and Juliet. In October he had an unsuccessful audition for the keyboard at the Bolshoi Theatre’s Beethoven Hall (the Leningrad Theatre had already abandoned the project). The attendees, indignant, left the hall one after another. More auditions and discussions take place, and finally Shakespeare’s original tragic finale was restored. Many of the artists in the 1936 ballet rejected Prokofiev’s work as unstageable and undanceable. The articles in the Pravda Daily against Shostakovich – Chaos instead of music (it trashed the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk Region) and Ballet falsity (on the ballet The Bright Brook, whose librettist was Piotrovsky)shattered Prokofiev. Stalin’s hard times hit artists, too. A year later Piotrovsky was shot, his name was erased from the Romeo and Juliet team.

The ballet premiered in a shortened version (the two orchestral suites were used) at the National Theatre in Brno on December 30^th, 1938 with choreography by Ivo Váňa-Psota. He played Romeo, Juliet was played by    Ivo Váňa-Psota as Romeo

Zora Šemberová. After two years the permission came to show the work on the Russian stage. The premiere almost fell through when the orchestra refused to play to “avoid the embarrassment” of Prokofiev’s new work. Still, Romeo and Juliet was performed for a Leningrad audience at the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre on January 11^th,  1940, with a new edition by choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky, conducted by Isai Sherman, starring Galina Ulanova and Konstantin Sergeyev. It was not easily imposed because of the expressive lyricism, which brings out deeper dimensions in the tragedy, because of the unaccustomed rhythmic, “inconvenient” for dance symphonic forms.

The composer’s imagination was astonished in the construction of the drama between the feuding Montecchi and Capuleti families, a drama of innocence and love, rivalry and treachery. The score counts 80 original themes that magnificently recreate the characters, the stage situations. Thanks to the first two orchestral suites, which Prokofiev composed in 1936 and conducted in concert in the USSR and some European countries, the ballet’s music became popular before it had been even staged, before it had become a ballet classic of the 20^th century. They are a concentrate of the work’s brightest moments.

The First Suite premiered on November 24^th, 1936 at the Bolshoi Theatre under the baton of Georges Sébastian. It contains 7 movements: the Folk Dance – the Scene – the Madrigal – the Menuet – Masks – Romeo and Juliet and the Death of Tybalt. The Second suite, also in 7 parts, was first performed on April 15^th,  1937 in Leningrad under the conductor’s baton and contains: Montagues and Capulets – Juliet as a Young Girl – Friar Laurence – Dance – Romeo and Juliet before parting – Dance of the Girls with Lilies – Romeo at Juliet’s tomb.