The work that was to become Tchaikovsky’s earliest orchestral masterpiece was actually inspired by fellow composer Mily Balakirev, who could not resist telling other composers what they ought to be writing. Soon after Balakirev had conducted an early Tchaikovsky tone poem (which the composer later destroyed), he suggested the idea of a piece based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The suggestion fell on fertile ground, because Tchaikovsky had just gotten over a passionate attachment to the soprano Desirée Artôt, an attachment that ended only when she suddenly married someone else. Still the young composer found himself drawing a blank at first. Balakirev offered lots of advice, including a formal layout of various kinds of musical material and a key scheme for the way the music would develop. Though this advice was gratuitous (and mostly ignored), it helped Tchaikovsky break the writer’s block he was suffering and start composing.

He wrote Romeo and Juliet in October and November 1869. After the first performance, Tchaikovsky (again with Balakirev’s input) reworked the score considerably during the summer of 1870. Then again in September 1880 he returned to the work for a final reworking of the closing bars, completing the definitive work as we know it today.

Even though Tchaikovsky actually invented all of the musical material, a fair part of the work’s success is due to Balakirev’s gentle badgering to keep him improving his score. Balakirev’s outline consists of three basic dramatic elements—the young lovers, their feuding families, and the sympathetic friar—allowed for color and variety and a coherent musical form that is also dramatically cogent: the music of the lovers is constantly overwhelmed by the sounds of conflict, just as Shakespeare’s protagonists meet their doom through the endless rivalry of the family factions. And though the score does not attempt to follow the plot of the play in any respect, the central moods, captured with splendid romantic passion, remain intact.

The soft opening, with its quiet tread of clarinets and bassoons, hints at liturgical music (hence Friar Laurence) without ever actually quoting an ecclesiastical melody. This second thought of Tchaikovsky’s—a product of the 1870 revision—functions perfectly both as introduction and later in developmental interplay with other themes. Gradually it grows more foreboding. A single chord, echoed between strings and woodwinds, faster and faster, suddenly explodes into the violent theme of the feuding families, all nervous punctuation and forceful syncopations in the home key of B minor. The full-scale return of the “fight” music begins harmonic movement to the related key of D major, where we can expect to hear a new idea.

Here Tchaikovsky took Balakirev’s advice about putting the new theme in the distant key of D-flat—but the wonderful surprise is Tchaikovsky’s own: approaching the new section as if it were going to be a cut-and-dried modulation to the “normal” key and then—just at the last moment—sinking down one half-step, with melting effect, as the theme begins. It is justly one of Tchaikovsky’s most famous lyric inspirations. This entire section remained unchanged through the several revisions of the score.

As the love music dies away in lingering afterthoughts, the development recalls the feud, with the Friar Laurence theme vigorously contrasted. This section was newly conceived and written in 1870, to much stronger effect than the original version. The “hovering” figure from the exposition recurs in passages of tension-filled waiting, and the conflict between the other motives builds to the powerful restatement. Throughout this new development Tchaikovsky carefully withholds the soaring love theme, saving it for a climactic statement in the recapitulation, where for the first time the entire orchestra plays it full force. This, too, was the product of the 1870 revision, with the rhythmic motive of the feud gradually infiltrating the extended close of the love music and overwhelming it again. The ending as it stands today, with total collapse and a poignant recollection of the dead lovers, came only in 1880. Thus it took Tchaikovsky a decade to bring this fantasy-overture to its present form (though, in the meantime, he had composed his Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies, the ballet Swan Lake and the opera Eugene Onegin). But the final changes, even though they were relatively slight, perfected the work that remains among his most satisfying in formal organization and expressive power. With good reason Tchaikovsky dedicated the score to Balakirev, whose kind tyranny had opened the path to its composition. —© Steven Ledbetter