Episode 14: Prokofiev's Scenes from Romeo and Juliet

Following multiple failed agreements with various ballet companies (including the Bolshoi, which declared the music impossible to dance to), Sergei Prokofiev reduced what would eventually become his most popular ballet to three orchestral suites.  Romeo and Juliet “is a great lyrical symphonic epic, one in which Prokofiev used his unique gift for beautiful melody to give life to all the characters,” says Michael Tilson Thomas.  Prokofiev’s work  uses character and emotional motifs to capture the dramatic action in Shakespeare’s classic love story.

John Adams' "Harmonielehre"

After a year-long writer’s block and amid feelings of uncertainty about how contemporary music would evolve, composer John Adams had a dream.  He dreamt that as he was driving across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and looking at the water, an oil tanker took off into the sky like a rocket ship.  He woke up the next day, and like a man possessed, began work on Harmonielehre.  The third movement was inspired by a second dream, in which Adams’ daughter  “rides perched on the shoulder of the Medieval mystic, Meister Eckhardt, as they hover among the heavenly bodies like figures painted on the high ceilings of old cathedrals,” Adams writes.  He veered off from many of his contemporaries in this work by moving from minimalism back to a more Romantic harmonic language. He viewed Harmonielehre, which shares a title with Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal text on harmony (it translates as “book of harmony”), as a way to teach himself not just about harmony in music, but in life as well.