As he had with his other ballet scores, Shostakovich plundered the score to The Limpid Stream to create a suite of the most popular numbers. In the cases of The Age of Gold (1930) and The Bolt (1931), the suites proved to have a more enduring popularity than the ballets themselves. In the case of The Limpid Stream, however, the suite did not prove as popular as the ballet itself. In the first place, The Limpid Stream was by far the most popular of Shostakovich ballets. Its deliberately simple-minded melodies, banal harmonies, straightforward rhythms, and garish colors had the work playing successfully in both Leningrad and Moscow from June 1935 through February 1936. In the second place, The Limpid Stream and, by implication, its suite were condemned in Pravda in an editorial in early February 1936, and both works were withdrawn. Shostakovich salvaged some of the music from the ballet and the suite in the first four Ballet Suites he and his friend Levon Atovmyan compiled in 1949 - 1953. However, The Limpid Stream and its suite disappeared from the repertoire.
