Sergei Prokofiev
Violin Concerto No. 2
Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev’s career traced a path that was irrevocably intertwined with the changing fortunes of his native Russia. Born in 1891 during the last years of the Tsars, he rose to fame early as a precocious “bad boy” of the avant-garde. He left Russia for America and Europe as his country struggled through revolution, and finally returned to his homeland seen first as a prodigal, later as an example of western decadence. Yet no matter how he was labeled, his music remained unmistakably his: energetic, harmonically challenging, lyrical, and dramatic.
Prokofiev was born in the village of Sontsovka in the Ukraine, an adored only child after the early deaths of his older sisters. Admitted (with youthful portfolio of sonatas, symphonies, and operas) at age thirteen to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and Tcherepnin. His self-assured intellect didn’t always win friends: he kept statistics on the number of mistakes each member of a harmony class made until one of them, he writes, “jumped on me, threw me to the floor, and pulled my ears.”
His early works were equally blunt: the novel dissonances and energetic percussiveness of his pieces set him firmly in the ranks of the “futurists.” He left the conservatory in 1914 after winning the Rubinstein Prize, having calculated that by playing his fiery Concerto No. 1 for piano in the competition, “my [piece] might impress the examiners by the novelty of technique; they simply would not be able to judge whether I was playing it well or not!”
His tours to Europe from 1914 to 1918 connected him with Russian expatriates such as the composer Igor Stravinsky and ballet impressario Sergey Diaghilev, for whom he wrote several ballets. A year after the Bolsheviks took power, Prokofiev received permission to travel to America, then Paris, where he lived and worked during the ’20s and early ’30s. He composed over sixty works during this period, varying from theatrical pieces to concert works. He categorized his style at this time as containing four “basic lines:”
“The first was the classical line, which could be traced back to my early childhood and the Beethoven sonatas I heard my mother play (…the Classical Symphony [1916-17]…). The second line, the modern trend…took the form of a search for my own harmonic language, developing later into a search for a language in which to express powerful emotions (…Scythian Suite [1915], The Gambler [opera, 1928], the Second Symphony [1924]) … The third line is the toccata, or the ‘motor’, line traceable perhaps to Schumann’s Toccata which made such a powerful impression on me (Etudes, Op. 2, [1909], the Scherzo of the Second Symphony, the repetitive intensity of the melodic figures in the Pas d’Acier
[ballet, 1925–6])… The fourth line is lyrical: it appears first as a thoughtful and meditative mood … sometimes partly contained in the long melody (…the beginning of the First Violin concerto [1911], Old Grandmother’s Tales [1912]).”
As a brash young composer in Russia he found himself praised or reviled as a modernist; in America and France he was more often seen as a representative of the Russia he had left behind. By the time he wrote The Prodigal Son (1929), the perhaps self-referential subject matter betrayed the composer’s homesickness. After several years of visits to his homeland, in 1936 he returned with his family to Russia to stay. He was, indeed, hailed as a prodigal son at first. This period produced some of his best-known work, including the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1935) and Peter and the Wolf (1936).
But as the iron grip of Stalin tightened, the apolitical Prokofiev found that his works must please the proletariat — as defined, of course, by the Politburo. He strove to continue writing his own idiosyncratic compositions, and was often successful (the film score Alexander Nevsky (1939), the ballet Cinderella (1945), his Fifth and Sixth symphonies). But by the end of his life he found that what was once thought “modern” could now be periodically denounced as bourgeois “formalism.” His American-born wife was deported; he found himself writing music for events such as the opening of a canal. He died rewriting portions of his ballet The Stone Flower to please officials of the Bolshoi, on March 5, 1953 — the same day Stalin died.
The Violin Concerto No. 2, in G minor, was the last work he composed before his final return to Russia. Written while Prokofiev was on tour, it was commissioned for the French violinist Robert Soetens, who premiered the piece in Madrid, 1935. It had been eighteen years since his first violin concerto, but the two works share a similar singing lyricism coupled with virtuoso passagework. The second, however, is more meditative at the beginning, more explosive at the end. There are echoes of both the romantic melodies and the brash peasant dance tunes from the composer’s Romeo and Juliet, written around the same time.
The Allegro moderato begins with a longing solo from the violin answered by the lower strings, then followed rather quickly by some brilliant passages with Prokofiev’s signature tonal shifts and modulations. Out of this grows the second theme, soulful and “one of the mature Prokofiev’s most felicitous melodic revelations” (Israel Nestyev, Prokofiev’s Russian biographer). The horn and then the oboe echo the theme as the violin solo takes flight, shortly bringing the string section along with it. The two melodic themes alternate and weave in and out of colorful brisk passages, until Prokofiev merges the two themes together in the recapitulation. The movement ends in a meditative mood, the horns sounding a muted call against the pizzicato of the strings.
The Andante assai of the second movement continues in something of the same mood, with strings now in plucked counterpoint to the solo’s smooth line. But the effect here is stately, following Prokofiev‘s “classical line” in its echo of earlier composers. The movement develops in the classical manner as well, with its theme and variation technique and interweaving melodic lines, such as the counter melody introduced by the clarinet and flute. Lyric lines and solo passages ebb and swell until the strings repeat their original counterpoint, but now in vigorous sustained tones. The soloist soars into a duet with the violin section, leading them into an energetic passage and then following the woodwinds into the second theme and variations (Allegretto), reminiscent of the flowing, dancing themes of Romeo and Juliet. Drums, bass strings, and bassoon announce a shift in mood back to the original theme. The movement ends as it began, with a stately pizzicato resolving to the quiet, sustained notes of the lowest strings and brass.
After so much restraint, Prokofiev breaks into his stormy self in the last movement. With a firm, pulsing beat the violin pulls the orchestra into an energetic dance, whirling like a dervish at times over the triplet rhythm. A lyrical, somewhat sad second theme makes a brief appearance, but the dance holds sway again. The percussion supplies spice with triangle or castanet, the clarinet sounds a liquid nightingale call, and the violin segues into a new, agitated theme. This theme, and a recapitulation of the second, alternate with the pervasive dance, as if the orchestra simply cannot escape its beat. Woodwinds and brass descend in a cascade of notes and the solo suddenly takes violent flight with no accompaniment other than insistent drumming. The string section leaps in for a final flourish, then the movement ends in a flurry of plucked strings and the thump of drums.
November 11, 1999