I don't know if this post has a point, per se, it's mostly just that the ask I sent Keith a million years ago about the Zoldyck theme referencing Dance of the Knights came up on Media Club Plus, and I got to thinking about that connection again, and wanted to talk about ballet and staging and how much I like prokofiev.
I'm not a musician or a dancer, I just like ballet, so probably anyone with even the remotest element of technical knowledge could do a better job of this, but I will try anyway.
If by chance you don't know, the first 5 seconds of the Zoldyck theme from the 2011 adaptation of Hunter x Hunter are the first five seconds of Dance of the Knights, the thirteenth track from Romeo and Juliet by Sergei Prokofiev. After that the songs diverge significantly, but they both retain the same low horn section as their backbone (it's mostly tubas and french horns, I think, but I might be corrected on that). They also share another common feature, where partway through they get interrupted. The horns stop completely, and we get a section that prominently features woodwind, especially flutes. In Romeo and Juliet this is Juliet's variation, in the Zoldyck Theme we might call this Killua's variation (it doesn't become Killua's actual theme, Ginpatsu no Shounen, which is more piano and strings focused, but there is a similar lightness and airiness that you could link them with). For a little bit the music gets bright and swirling and hopeful. In Dance of the Knights, this breaks utterly as the martial horns come back in, but though the Zoldyck Theme also gets lower and darker again it doesn't go all the way back to the relentless horns, ending on very deep strings instead.
Zoldyck theme: https://youtu.be/l8pD9axPmcw?si=yzkWnjyL9ufEmmSC
Dance of the knights: https://youtu.be/bBsKplb2E6Q?si=ntgzlDvxd650dKlt
[If you want to compare the moment when both songs change, it occurs in the Zolydyck theme at 1:09, and in Dance of the Knights at 3:00.]
Give them a listen and you'll hear what I'm talking about. And I want to talk about why I think this is such a clever compositional choice for hunter x hunter, but first I'm just gonna chat ballet.
One of the things you have to do in ballet is break up your dances. There are, very roughly, three kinds of dances. Solo/pair dances, which feature the main artists doing their most technically impressive moves; small group dances, which also feature either the main dancers or key secondary dancers with big parts, and which are technically complex though not quite as demanding as a full pas des deux or a solo dance; and ensemble pieces, which focus more on lots of dancers moving in beautifully synchronised patterns and give the lead dancers a chance to rest.
(To massively digress, one thing that's notable about ballet is that these dances can sometimes be in tension with the narrative elements of the work. If you've ever seen Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, you'll know that act 1 has this clear story throughline, where Clara gets the Nutcracker for Christmas, tries to repair him when her brother damages him, finds out he's a prince in disguise, helps him defeat the Mouse King (his mortal enemy), and act 1 ends with her being taken to his kingdom as a reward. Act 2, on the other hand, has basically no plot, but still needs to have all these different dance scenes, which leads to such oddities as the Spanish, Arabian and Chinese dances turning up in the middle for absolutely no reason. The Korean production I saw reinterpreted them as the chocolate, tea and coffee dances, which I thought was a nice touch. They're all small group dances and the music is great if wildly culturally appropriative. Anyway.)
The second scene of Romeo and Juliet moves through a number of different kinds of dance as it tells the story of the Capulet ball. To talk through this, I'm going to use a full staging of the show recorded on youtube. We'll start here, at this timestamp: https://youtu.be/-hM0B70F1YM?t=1103
If you have time, I'd recommend watching all the way through to the end of Dance of the Knights. It's about 15 minutes of the performance, but I think it really helps to have seen it. But I'll try and break everything down anyway.
It starts with Juliet in her room alone, dancing with her nurse, a solo dance that gives us time with Juliet's character. It's notable that ballet mostly requires stories that have a lot of space for female parts, since the dance moves done by ballerinas are considered some of the most interesting and challenging parts of the art form. In Romeo and Juliet it ends up being extremely easy to read Juliet as the main character, since she gets a lot of musical and dance focus. You may want to bear this in mind vis a vis Killua. The music for this section is called Juliet as a Young Girl, because subtext is for cowards. It also introduces us to Paris, doing all the narrative set up you might remember from the play.
Then we get an ensemble section of the guests arriving, and Romeo and Mercutio breaking into the ball. In the staging I'm working from, Mercutio gets an excellent small group dance here - that's not the only way you can stage this, but it's pretty traditional. (I super recommend watching this dance, which starts at 24:57, just because it's got some gorgeous moves in it.) As with Juliet's solo dance, this small group dance is very lighthearted and playful. These are fine young lads having a good time. They frolic and bound, not a care in the world. Romeo watches aloofly, because he is Sad and In Love. But eventually even he joins in, unable to resist a good caper. The scene ends on a really ominous moment as a beggar comes looking for alms. Romeo gives him a coin before his friends drag him away, and then the beggar dies outside the Capulet mansion as the first chord of Dance of the Knights begins to play. This is not a required part of the staging, but it is kind of inspired to have a death mark the opening notes of a song that is all about foreshadowing the violence to come. (Whatever about the implicit class politics, which I will not interrogate lest we be here all day.)
Dance of the Knights is a full ensemble piece, after the solo and small group dances we just saw. It features all the adult Capulets, and it starts with multiple couples moving in smooth synchronisation. The dancing is extremely slow and deliberate. The low horns and high strings fight each other, and the low horns shift to match the strings, breaking the martial backbone of the music as the song becomes frantic, running up and down scales. Just as it feels like the whole song, and the whole society it embodies, is about to fall apart, the martial horns come back in, forcing everyone back into order. The dancers barely seem to notice this, but we the audience certainly do. The adult society of the Capulets is one of rigid control and inflexible order. It is a society that demands conformity, and as we will see in a moment, expects Juliet to do as she is told. It is also a society in crisis, and its only tool for resisting that crisis is to keep everyone in line.
As the music breaks for the first time, at 30:34, Juliet arrives. She brings her sweet high strings, flutes and triangle with her. She is introduced to Paris, who kisses her hand and wooes her, and the music stays light. But when he begins to actually dance with her, they join the other couples, and the deep martial horns reappear. If Juliet marries Paris, she will be bound into the rigidity and control of her family expectations.
Then the music gets sweet and light again. Juliet and Paris dance a mini pas de deux with support from the other younger ladies and gentlemen. Love is here! It's at least possible, however briefly... but no. The song gets slower and slower, and at last, inescapably, the martial horns come back. This time they bring not just the adult dancers, but swords. Violence is here and it is not going away. (This is another section, starting at 33:57, that I really recommend watching because it looks sick as hell.)
And then Dance of the Knights ends, and we move into Juliet's Variation, as she and Romeo get some solo dance time to meet and express their immediate passion for each other. But it isn't the last time that Dance of the Knights will be heard in the ballet. We'll hear it again at 44:40, as Tybalt recognises Romeo and gets him kicked out of the ball (just after he and Juliet have had a lovely pas de deux). And every time the violence of the adult society comes back to coerce these two into step with their norms, Dance of the Knights will show back up.
Ballet is an art form that works on a purely emotional level. The reason you go watch it is a) the incredible physicality on display in the dancing itself, and b) the way that that physicality combines with the music to express the purest and most melodramatic emotion. I think the performance I linked does a great job of laying out the fundamentals of what the music works with the staging to do for this scene.
It can then be fun to look at some other examples. I'm not sure how enamoured I am with the pure black costumes of this version, but I do love how it starts with the swords: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF9R9OaZuqA. And even though the superficial aesthetics are different, you can immediately see how it's leaning on the same concept. This is music and dance about a big group moving in lockstep, with no space for divergence or difference allowed.
This version from the Bolshoi Ballet gives Paris his focus earlier in the song, while the martial horns are very present, and gives the interruption to Romeo and Juliet's first meeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n84lxV83Ts I think this might be the most traditional interpretation of the score, since the music used for the interruption is Romeo and Juliet's love theme. In this version the final reinstatement of the horns tells us that Juliet has realised who Romeo is, and as she flees, the other dancers return. It's a slightly different read on the music, sure, but the overall effect remains basically the same.
Once you know all this staging information, I think you can appreciate Post Ballet's phenomenal, electric version of Dance of the Knights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OfFt7y8iCM
It's so brilliant precisely because it plays beautifully with the gender dynamics of the classic scene. It takes everything we know about the structure and rules of this section of Romeo and Juliet and executes on them perfectly even as it plays with them. The dramatic and ominous synchronisation that starts the piece, Juliet's entrance as the music changes, the way that the song explores the tensions between Juliet, Paris and Romeo... It's sooooo good. It's exactly why I can't help adoring ballet, because when you know how the scenes play out, each choice of movement becomes a million times more expressive, a sublimely physical art that is in conversation with every other iteration of the same performance. (And I would be remiss not to point out that post ballet giving two of the three roles to black dancers is huge too, since ballet is a hideously racist art form for the most part. It's changed very, very slightly in the last twenty years, but not nearly enough, so it's always really pleasing to see a piece consciously resisting that.)
But let's get back to hunter x hunter.
The thing about anime, at least shonen anime, is that it's very like ballet. Everyone is having big emotional melodramatic feelings. They might be expressing them by punching rather than dancing, as Keith very aptly said on media club plus ("our punches are changing our ideas about the world" is never leaving my head), but the way that the music and the action interplay is extremely balletic.
I don't think it takes a brain genius to see why Yoshihisa Hirano picked Dance of the Knights for the Zoldyck theme. Killua is being coerced by his family's expectations of him in a very similar way to Juliet. They want him to follow the family path, to become an assassin, and not to form relationships they don't approve of. But oh no, here comes Gon, his Romeo (textually true per the music choice!), and it turns out that no amount of Zoldyck coercion is going to work.
I also think this is why the composition of the Zoldyck theme uses the same structure as Dance of the Knights, breaking the oppressive pattern of the horns and choir with the sweet flute music. Killua's desires cannot be contained, they must be expressed, they flout all the rules he has learned and rise to the surface anyway. And unlike Juliet, the song doesn't end with the horns reasserting themselves. This is not a tragedy, and Killua is not doomed as Juliet is. The way ahead might be dangerous, hence the low strings that end it, but it's not final. It's not totally closed off.
And then again, like Romeo and Juliet, the Zoldyck theme isn't a one time thing. This last paragraph is why this post is tagged hunter x hunter spoilers. Because in a hundred and fifty episode anime, as in a two hour ballet, you get the chance to hear every leitmotif more than once. The Zoldyck theme hasn't played for the last time, and when Killua next struggles with the conflict between his heritage and his relationship with Gon, those martial horns will be right there, reminding us of exactly how powerful the emotional coercion of family is.
