Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia (Spartacus)

Khachaturian completed the score of Spartacus in 1954, after years of work on a subject — the slave revolt against Rome — that Soviet theatres had wanted since the late 1930s. Leonid Yakobson's staging opened at the Kirov in Leningrad on 27 December 1956; Yuri Grigorovich's Bolshoi version of 1968 displaced it and became the production by which the ballet is known. The score brought Khachaturian a Lenin Prize. The Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia found a second audience in Britain from 1971 as the theme of the television series The Onedin Line, detached from any Roman context at all.