Le pas d'acier (Prokofiev)

Le pas d'acier (The Steel Step or The Leap of Steel; Russian: Стальной скок) is a 1926 ballet in two scenes (Op. 41) containing 11 dances composed by Sergei Prokofiev. Prokofiev also created an orchestral 4 movement suite from the ballet (Op. 41b).

The ballet was commissioned by impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who had been greatly impressed by the exhibition in Paris in 1925 of Russian contemporary artists at the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, and was originally intended to "celebrate Soviet industrialization." Prokofiev wrote the score, based on a scenario by the Constructivist artist Georgi Yakulov and himself, in 1925–1926, much of it during his tour of the United States. Prokofiev wrote that his music represented "a move towards a Russian musical language, not that of the Fairy Tales of [the folklorist] Afanasyev, but one which could describe contemporary life. [...It] was a decisive step leading me towards chromaticism and diatonics [...] A whole series of themes is composed solely for the white keys."

The original scenario was titled Ursignol, and was approved by Diaghilev in the autumn of 1925. It appears however that over the next two years the story-line was changed, against Yakulov's wishes, as Diaghilev made preparations for the first production. The original scenario was rooted in scenes of Soviet life, of which Yakulov had experience (but the émigrés Prokofiev and Diaghilev did not), involving speculators, sailors and workers, and with scenes in a station, a market and a factory, centered on life in the early Soviet Union. The factory scene features machines and sprocketed wheels as the setting for a danced romance between a sailor and a young girl worker.

Although no record of the choreography of the eventual 1927 production has survived, it is clear from the comments of critics that the scenario had been altered from the original so as to include scenes of Russian folk-lore (which were a typical element of Ballets Russes productions. With choreography by Léonide Massine, the Ballets Russes premiered the work in Paris at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt on June 7, 1927. Critical reaction was extremely mixed. The critic André Levinson wrote:

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