When is comes to Sergei Prokofiev’s brooding Cinderella score, “There’s nothing Disney about it,” insists Stanton Welch
Setting the stage for Artistic Director Stanton Welch’s unique retelling of Cinderella is Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s score, composed between 1940 and 1944, commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater after the success of Romeo and Juliet.
“The Prokofiev score is actually pretty dark. If you sat at home and turned it on and listened to it, you don’t see fairies and magic. You see a dark, troubled story,” Welch explains.
And Welch is spot on in his assessment. As Simon Morrison explains in his book The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years, the Russian composer is noted for telling the theater that “he imagined the ballet less in the French spirit of Charles Perrault” and more in “the Russian spirit of Aleksandr Afanasyev, whose version of the traditional Cinderella fairytale has very dark hues.”
Throughout the score’s composition, the events of World War II were unfolding, and Prokofiev faced even more turmoil in his personal life, leaving his wife and two sons in 1941 for Mira, a 26-year-old poet whom he met in 1939. With reality striking tenfold around him, one could speculate his motivation for depicting Cinderella, as Prokofiev says, “not only as a fairytale character but also as a real person, feeling, experiencing, and moving among us” to make sense of the events surrounding him.
No matter his motivation, Prokofiev’s real-life version of the princess lends a helping hand in materializing Welch’s own modern Cinderella – a Cinderella who doesn’t rely on fairies but relies on herself.
By Jasmine Fuller Cane
En Pointe with Houston Ballet 
