Sergei Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights, also known as The Mon­tagues and Capulets, comes from his bal­let, Romeo and Juli­et. It’s an emo­tion­al­ly charged piece of music, with strong horns and wood­winds lay­er­ing over a pow­er­ful melod­ic line played by the strings. Prokofiev’s dark and brood­ing pas­sages send chills up the spine and cre­ate a won­der­ful­ly dark atmos­phere, pre­sum­ably to express the ten­sion between the rival fam­i­lies of the Mon­tagues and Capulets. No won­der it’s used in film and tele­vi­sion so often; not least, of course, in the BBC’s The Appren­tice.

Like the orig­i­nal play Romeo and Juli­et, the sto­ry of Sergei Prokofiev and his famous bal­let with the same title is filled with betray­al, strug­gle and untime­ly death. After the Rev­o­lu­tion, Prokofiev had left Rus­sia with the offi­cial bless­ing of the author­i­ties, and resided in the Unit­ed States, Ger­many, and Paris, respec­tive­ly, mak­ing his liv­ing as a com­pos­er, pianist and con­duc­tor. He was lured back to the Sovi­et Union in 1936 with promis­es of lucra­tive com­mis­sions, but the bureau­crat who com­mis­sioned Romeo and Juli­et was exe­cut­ed, as was the Cen­tral Com­mit­tee flunky who approved the bal­let’s orig­i­nal hap­py end­ing (Prokofiev had orig­i­nal­ly changed Shake­speare’s trag­ic end­ing but this evi­dent­ly did not go down well with the Russ­ian author­i­ties!). The author­i­ties then exiled Prokofiev’s first wife to the Gulag, and in 1938 con­fis­cat­ed Prokofiev’s pass­port, deter­min­ing that he need­ed “ide­o­log­i­cal cor­rect­ing” from too much West­ern influ­ence.

Despite all this inter­fer­ence, how­ev­er, what comes down to us today is an icon­ic piece of musi­cal dra­ma, with Dance of the Knights being the stand­out piece. We watch it here per­formed by La Scala Milano, as the Capulets strut their stuff on the dance floor. Great cos­tumes too!