Romeo and Juliet (Tchaikovsky) a literary program. Thus, Balakirev had transformed "King Lear" into an instrumental drama and now offered it as a model to Tchaikovsky. While basing "Romeo and Juliet" on "King Lear" was Balakirev's suggestion, reducing the plot of the former to one central conflict and then combining it with the binary structure of sonata form was Tchaikovsky's idea. However, executing that plot in the music we know today came only after two radical revisions. The first version of "Romeo and Juliet" contained basically an opening fugato and a confrontation of the two themes—exactly what an academically trained composer might be expected
Romeo and Juliet The religious metaphors of "shrine", "pilgrim", and "saint" were fashionable in the poetry of the time and more likely to be understood as romantic rather than blasphemous, as the concept of sainthood was associated with the Catholicism of an earlier age. Later in the play, Shakespeare removes the more daring allusions to Christ's resurrection in the tomb he found in his source work: Brooke's "Romeus and Juliet". In the later balcony scene, Shakespeare has Romeo overhear Juliet's soliloquy, but in Brooke's version of the story, her declaration is done alone. By bringing Romeo into the scene to eavesdrop, Shakespeare breaks