The drama Masquerade by the short-lived Russian playwright and poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841)— once controversial due to its sharp commentaries on Russian society—has served as inspiration for music on many occasions, providing the subject matter for several operas and at least one ballet. Aram Khachaturian followed the example of his famous countryman Alexander Glazunov in writing incidental music to accompany the stage action for Masquerade. Khachaturian's score was prepared for a production by the Vakhtangov Theater; it had its premiere on June 21, 1941. The music proved popular, and in 1944 the composer extracted a suite of five pieces from the score for concert performance.

Khachaturian's music is rather lighter in tone than the play itself. He employs occasional irony in depicting the gaiety of Russian social life in the early nineteenth century, but otherwise eschews the darkness of the play in favor of tuneful, light-hearted music with an occasional inflection of Russian folk styles. The orchestration is big and splashy. One portion of the incidental score, "Nina's Song," had some independent success in Russia but is not included in the suite, which begins with the apparently carefree but vaguely sinister Waltz. The slightly sentimental Nocturne, a splashy Mazurka, and a touching Romance that shares in some of the Nocturne's sentimentality follow, and the suite concludes with a lively Gallop. The most familiar of these excerpts is probably the opening Waltz, which was played at the 1978 funeral services for Khachaturian in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

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