Masquerade Suite

Khachaturian wrote the music for Lermontov's play Masquerade in 1941, for a production at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow that opened on 21 June — the eve of the German invasion. The theatre was bombed within weeks. In 1944 he drew five numbers from the score into a concert suite: Waltz, Nocturne, Mazurka, Romance and Galop. The opening waltz was the number he had struggled over longest, because Lermontov's text requires a waltz that a character can describe as sounding sad; it became the most played thing he wrote apart from the Sabre Dance.