On the Dnieper
ballet
On the Dnieper (На Днепре), Op. 51, is a ballet in two scenes with prelude and epilogue by Sergei Prokofiev. Composed in 1931 as his fourth work in the genre, it resulted from a commission by the Paris Opera Ballet after the unexpected death in 1929 of Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev and after the success of The Prodigal Son. The premiere took place in 1932; a year later Prokofiev extracted an orchestral suite from the work, Op. 51 bis, using six of its twelve movements.
Background
Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario who had led Ballets Russes to distinguished success, died suddenly in 1929, hence ending Prokofiev's collaboration with the troupe. (The Prodigal Son was the last such collaboration.) Seeing the success of the work, the Paris Opéra commissioned Prokofiev to write another ballet. Serge Lifar, formerly a close associate with Diaghilev, was responsible for creating the setting and choreography. However, he did not place any significance to the scenario. Rather, the ballet was created as a sequence of dances.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “On the Dnieper” as ballet. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as ballet. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7091333. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1931, 1929 and 1932.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “On the Dnieper” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.