Showing posts with label Dimitri Schostakowitsch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dimitri Schostakowitsch. Show all posts
Friday, August 8, 2025
Friday, May 2, 2025
Fugues and Other Musical Charms From Bach to Shostakovich
An example of a fugue structure © composerfocus.com
Among the most feared course requirements for many aspiring composers and students of music is a class simply labeled “Fugue.” And it’s no wonder, as a good many universities that still teach this kind of skills will ask you to sit in this particular class for an entire semester. And invariably, you will have to compose a fugue for your final project. The basic premise is simple enough. Take a short melody or phrase introduced in one part. That melody then taken up by other parts and developed by interweaving the parts. What sounds simple is in reality a highly complex process of rules and restrictions that is commonly regarded as the most fully developed procedure of imitative counterpoint.
Bach’s unfinished fugue in The Art of Fugue
It is hardly surprising that a good many composers past and present consider the process of writing a fugue an “exercises in a dead language.” Yet for the musical and expressive genius Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), the possibilities within these restrictions were endless. His most celebrated and extensively studied collection of contrapuntal movements The Art of Fugue explores the possibilities inherent in a single musical theme. Demonstrating every compositional technique and method known to him, Bach composed eigthteen movements; fourteen fugues and four canons. The collection remained unfinished, however, as Bach died while incorporating his musical signature. How many more gripping jewels he might have composed, we will never know.
Mozart’s “Jupiter” fugal entries
Even during Bach’s lifetime, fugues and other forms of imitative counterpoint were considered seriously old fashioned. The aesthetics of music and culture had simply changed dramatically. During his extensive travels, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was exposed to a multiplicity of compositional styles, tastes and genres. Mozart, the undisputed pop star of the 18th century, unrelentingly integrated, synthesized and transformed stylistic and musical conventions. It might reasonably be argued, however, that it took the encounter with the music of Bach and all those marvelous fugues that eventually produced compositions of universal appeal and stunning individuality. Mozart had been exposed to counterpoint throughout his life, but he engaged in serious study of fugue only during the 1780s. The diplomat Baron Gottfried van Swieten—who penned the libretto for Haydn’s Creation—was an avid collector of musical manuscripts. Wanting to have these works performed, he held regular musical parties in his Viennese residence, and Mozart was a steady guest. He reports to his sister, “nothing is played but fugues by Handel and Bach.” Mozart’s contact with the mastery of the German contrapuntal tradition opened a completely new musical horizon. He produced a number of stand-alone fugues, and this newly gained compositional skill helped to inform the creation of his final sublime orchestral masterpieces. Words simply can’t describe the jaw-dropping and breathtaking fugal display of quintuple invertible counterpoint in the final movement of the “Jupiter.”
Johannes Brahms
In 1899, Ernest Walker addressed the 25th session of the Royal Musical Association with a lecture on Johannes Brahms. He described the composer’s musical style as a “fusion of heterogeneous materials with the desire for emotional expression.” Essentially then, Walker saw Brahms as the logical union of Bach’s contrapuntal art and Beethoven’s formal perfection. To his contemporaries and critics, Brahms looked like a bastion of musical conservatism. Surprisingly, it was Arnold Schoenberg who suggested that Brahms was “a great innovator in the realm of musical language, and that his chamber music prepared the way for the radical changes in musical conception at the turn of the 20th century.” But let’s be clear, musical language for Brahms always starts in strict accordance with his extensive knowledge of counterpoint and fugue. He studied every available treatise on this subject and the integrity of the musical structure is paired with the attempt to achieve a deeper level of contrapuntally inspired motivic cohesion. Just listen to the finale of his E-minor Cello Sonata, a movement that epitomizes Brahms’ style. The fugal subject is derived from Bach’s Art of Fugue, and the movement weaves together a highly contrapuntal style with the exploitation of the possibilities inherent in sonata form. Through his study of fugue, Brahms became aware of his place within the Classical tradition, and the inspiration he drew from it resulted in the revitalization of classical form.
Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin
As a young student, Nadia Boulanger discovered Maurice Ravel cheerfully writing counterpoint exercises in Fauré’s class. She recalled, “I had a surprise when I found myself in Fauré’s class and discovered Ravel was there, too, doing as I used to do then, traditional counterpoint. I didn’t always find it interesting, yet it seemed quite natural that Ravel should do it… It was only years later that I asked him why he was still studying counterpoint. ‘One must clean the house from time to time; I often do it that way,’ he replied.” Ravel’s devotion to the discipline of counterpoint and fugue provided the basis for his elegant and imaginative contrapuntal virtuosity. In fact, Ravel’s first-level entries in the Prix de Rome competitions between the years 1900 and 1905 were naturally five fugues. His engagement with strict contrapuntal forms continued in the piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, completed when he was discharged from military service in 1917. First performed by Marguerite Long in 1919, the audience was suitably surprised and impressed to discover that a meandering and jazz-inspired “Fugue” was part of the collection.
The Esterházy castle
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) entered into the services of the Esterházy family as a court musician in 1761, and he would remain on the job for a total of 41 years. Much of his career was spent at the family’s remote estate, with Haydn reporting “Well, here I sit in my wilderness; forsaken, like some poor orphan, almost without human society… nobody is nearby who could distract me or confuse me about myself. I had no choice but had to become original.” Haydn had turned forty and was working on his six string quartets opus 20, when originality struck. Whereas in earlier efforts he would often fuse the viola and cello parts together in one musical line, he now made the fullest use of four completely independent voices. And one of the clearest ways of demonstrating complete independence of individual voices is to write strict counterpoint and fugues.
Haydn: Sun Quartets, Op. 20
For his opus 20, subsequently nicknamed “Sun Quartets” because the sun is displayed on the cover of the first edition, Haydn composed three fugal finales. Haydn was undoubtedly the leader of fugal composition and technique in the Classical era, and writing fugal finales also offered a brand new solution to the relative weighting of all movements. These fugues are not dry academic exercises, however, as Haydn greatly expanded the texture and dynamics and experimented with flexible phrase length and structure. Every measure is full of variety and unpredictability, with Haydn combining his extensive knowledge of historical sources with the furthest reaches of his brilliant musical imagination.
Beethoven: Sketches for the String Quartet Op. 131
As a young and eager student of music, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) received thorough instruction in counterpoint and fugal writing. During his early days in Vienna he even attracted attention by playing fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier on his recitals. Fugal passages are found in his early piano sonatas and also in the “Eroica,” but fugues did not take on a central role in Beethoven’s oeuvre until late in his career. No doubt you are familiar with the fugue in the Cello Sonata, Op. 102 No. 2, the technically devilish fugue in the “Hammerklavier,” the massive dissonant fugue published as “Große Fuge” Op. 133, and fugal passages in the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony. However, it is his Opus 131 string quartet that is considered the pinnacle of his creative output. Writing in 1870, Richard Wagner published a poetic description of the work, “Tis the dance of the whole world itself: wild joy, the wail of pain, love’s transport, utmost bliss, grief, frenzy, riot, suffering, the lightning flickers, thunders growl: and above it the stupendous fiddler who bears and bounds it all, who leads it haughtily from whirlwind into whirlwind, to the brink of the abyss – he smiles at himself, for to him this sorcery was the merest play—and night beckons him. His day is done.” Written during a period of immense personal suffering, the opening fugue has been called “the most superhuman piece of music that Beethoven has ever written.” It is like a mysterious vision of another universe and represents for some critics “the melancholiest sentiment ever expressed in music.”
Simon Sechter
A few months before his death, Franz Schubert (1797-1828) first laid eyes on a score of Handel oratorios. “Now for the first time,” he writes, “I see what I lack, but I will study hard with Sechter so that I can make good the omission.” Simon Sechter was probably Vienna’s most famous teacher of counterpoint, and he recalled, “A short time before Schubert’s last illness he came to me… in order to study counterpoint and fugue, because, as he put it, he realized that he needed coaching in these.”
Organ at Heiligenkreuz Monastary
Schubert only managed to have one lesson with Sechter, before he was taken severely ill. He wrote to a friend eight days later, “I am ill. I have had nothing to eat or drink for eleven days now, and can only wander feebly and uncertainly between armchair and bed.” One week later Schubert passed away. Around his lesson with Sechter and his untimely death, Schubert and his friend, the composer Franz Lachner, visited the Heiligenkreuz monastery south of Vienna. Apparently, it was Schubert who suggested that they each write a fugue for the famous organ, which they both did. The Schubert manuscript is lost, but a copy of the work, written in four staves instead of the normally three for organ, did survive. As such, it was first published in 1844 for organ or piano four-hand, but it might well be the case that this fugue represents the very last composition Schubert ever completed.
Dmitri Shostakovich © Deutsche Fotothek
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) rapidly composed his Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues between 10 October 1950 and 25 February 1951. This polyphonic cycle is the first work composed in the twentieth century that follows the tradition and the dimension of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The Shostakovich cycle embraces all twenty-four keys, however, it is organized around the circle of fifths, and not in chromatic ascending order like Bach. We know that Shostakovich played the Bach preludes and fugues as a young boy, and in 1950 he was an honorary member of the jury of a piano competition organized in Leipzig for the 200th anniversary of the death of Bach. Bach’s music, and especially the Well-Tempered Clavier, must have given Shostakovich a certain creative impulse and in conversation with some German musicians in Leipzig he exclaimed, “Why shouldn‘t we try to continue this wonderful tradition.” Back home, Shostakovich was in political hot water, fired from his teaching positions in Moscow and Leningrad, with his music officially banned from concerts and broadcast. In fact, he was on the verge of suicide, and he “decided to start working again… I am going to write a prelude and fugue every day. I shall take into consideration the experience of Johann Sebastian Bach.” As with Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, the fugue served as the vehicle for the expression of the most personal, intimate and uncompromising thoughts and feelings.
Sunday, January 19, 2025
What is a Symphony?
After the extraordinary musical developments of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven the composition of a symphony became a daunting challenge, for many years the ultimate challenge for any composer. Many rose magnificently to that challenge, not least Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius and Shostakovich
As Richard Bratby notes in his article What is a Symphony?: 'Few musical terms carry such baggage. And to write a symphony, now as then, means engaging with Western music’s most ambitious ongoing attempt to create meaning out of sound; declaring to the world that you have something important to say – and are about to deploy all your creative powers to say it.'
We hope that the gathering of the 10 composers below serves as a informative introduction to the vast universe of symphonic writing, outlining the diverse ways that the greatest composers have responded to the task of writing a symphony, from the 18th century to the 20th. There are many outstanding symphonists to explore outside this initial list of 10 (Mendelssohn, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Copland, Carl Nielsen, Florence Price, Per Nørgård, Malcolm Arnold, John Adams – to name just a few), but we hope that this guide will set you off an an inspiring listening journey.
We have recommended both a complete symphony-cycle and a recording of an individual symphony for each composer.
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Haydn’s contribution to musical history is immense, he was nicknamed ‘the father of the symphony’ (despite Stamitz’s prior claim) and was progenitor of the string quartet. Like all his well-trained contemporaries, Haydn had a thorough knowledge of polyphony and counterpoint (and, indeed, was not averse to using it) but his music is predominantly homophonic. His 104 symphonies cover a wide range of expression and harmonic ingenuity.
Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra / Adám Fischer (Brilliant Classics)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
There is less than half a century between the death of Handel (1759) and the first performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio (1809). Bach and Handel were still composing when Haydn was a teenager. To compare the individual ‘sound world’ of any of these four composers is to hear amazingly rapid progress in musical thinking. Without doubt, the most important element of this was the development of the sonata and symphonic forms. During this period, a typical example generally followed the same basic pattern: four movements – 1) the longest, sometimes with a slow introduction, 2) slow movement, 3) minuet, 4) fast, short and light in character. Working within this formal structure, each movement in turn had its own internal structure and order of progress. Most of Haydn’s and Mozart’s sonatas, symphonies and chamber music are written in accordance with this pattern and three-quarters of all Beethoven’s music conforms to ‘sonata form’ in one way or another.
Mozart composed 41 symphonies and in the later ones (try the famous opening of No 40 in G minor) enters a realm beyond Haydn’s – searching, moving and far from impersonal.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Ludwig van Beethoven coupled his genius for music with profoundly held political beliefs and an almost religious certainty about his purpose. With the possible exception of Wagner, no other composer has, single-handedly, changed the course of music so dramatically and continued to develop and experiment throughout his entire career. His early music, built on the Classical paths trod by Haydn and Mozart, demonstrates his individuality in taking established musical structures and re-shaping them to his own ends. Unusual keys and harmonic relationships are explored, while as early as the Third Symphony (Eroica), the music is vastly more inventive and cogent than anything Mozart achieved even in a late masterpiece like the Jupiter. Six more symphonies followed, all different in character, all attempting new goals of human expression, culminating in the great Choral Symphony (No 9) with its ecstatic final choral movement celebrating man’s existence. No wonder so many composers felt daunted by attempting the symphonic form after Beethoven and that few ever attempted more than the magic Beethovenian number of nine.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
On March 26, 1828, in the Musikverein of Vienna, there was given for the first time a programme entirely devoted to Schubert’s music. It was put on by his friends, of course, but though successful, was never even reviewed. Less than eight months later, Schubert died of typhoid, delirious, babbling of Beethoven. He was 31 and was buried as near to him as was practicable, with the epitaph ‘Here lie rich treasure and still fairer hopes’. Schubert left no estate at all, absolutely nothing – except his manuscripts.
It was only by chance and the diligence of a few musicians that some of it came to light – in 1838 Schumann happened to visit Schubert’s brother and came across the great Symphony in C (the Ninth) and urged its publication; the Unfinished Symphony was not heard until 1865, after the score was found in a chest; it was George Grove (of Grove’s Dictionary fame) and the young Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) who unearthed in a publisher’s house in Vienna Schubert’s Symphonies Nos 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6, 60 songs and the music for Rosamunde. That was in 1867. Over a century later, in 1978, the sketches for a tenth symphony were unearthed in another Viennese archive.
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
‘I never had a more serious pupil than you,’ remarked Bruckner’s renowned teacher of counterpoint, Simon Sechter. Certainly, no one could ever accuse Bruckner of being frivolous and quite how this unsophisticated, obsequious boor came to write nine symphonies of such originality and epic splendour is one of music’s contradictions. You don’t turn to Bruckner the man or the musician for the light touch. His worship of Wagner verged on the neurotic for, really, there is something worrying about his debasement before the composer of Tristan. The dedication of his Third Symphony to Wagner reads: ‘To the eminent Excellency Richard Wagner the Unattainable, World-Famous, and Exalted Master of Poetry and Music, in Deepest Reverence Dedicated by Anton Bruckner’; before the two men eventually met, Bruckner would sit and stare at his idol in silent admiration, and after hearing Parsifal for the first time, fell on his knees in front of Wagner crying, ‘Master – I worship you’. His soliciting of honours, his craving for recognition and lack of self-confidence, allied with an unprepossessing appearance and a predilection for unattainable young girls, paints a disagreeable picture. The reverse of the coin is that of the humble peasant ill at ease in society, devoutly religious (most of his works were inscribed ‘Omnia ad majorem Dei gloriam’) and a personality of almost childlike simplicity and ingenuousness. God, Wagner and Music were his three deities.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Not all composers fell under Wagner’s spell. Brahms was the epitome of traditional musical thought. His four symphonies are far nearer the style of Beethoven than those of Mendelssohn or Schumann, and the first of these was not written until 1875, when Wagner had all but completed The Ring. Indeed Brahms is by far the most classical of the German Romantics. He wrote little programme music and no operas. It’s a curious coincidence that he distinguished himself in the very musical forms that Wagner chose to ignore – the fields of chamber music, concertos, variation writing and symphonies.
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Mahler is the last great Romantic symphonist, music conceived on the grandest scale and employing elaborate forces. He wanted to express his view of the human condition, to set down his lofty ideals about Life, Death and the Universe. 'My symphonies represent the contents of my entire life.'
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
To most people Sibelius is the composer of Finlandia and the Karelia Suite; to others he is one of the great symphony composers; to the people of Finland he is these things and a national hero. While he was still alive the Finnish government issued stamps with his portrait and would have erected a statue to him as well had not Sibelius himself discouraged the project. Probably no composer in history has meant so much to his native country as did Sibelius. He still does. ‘He is Finland in music; and he is Finnish music,’ observed one critic.
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Vaughan Williams emerged as an adventurous, unmistakably English composer with a distinct voice of his own. His discovery in the early 1900s of English folksong, through the recently formed English Folk Music Society, focused his style. VW and Gustav Holst, his lifelong friend whom he’d met at the Royal College, went out seeking the source of their country’s folksongs; many had never been written down before and the cataloguing and research that VW and Holst undertook in this area was of considerable cultural significance. His music now took on a different character. Apart from war service (for which he volunteered, although over 40), Vaughan Williams devoted the rest of his long life to composition, teaching and conducting.
Vaughan Williams worked on into old age with undiminished creative powers – his Eighth Symphony appeared in 1955 (the score includes parts for vibraphone and xylophone) while his Ninth, composed at the age of 85, uses a trio of saxophones.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Following his death, the government of the USSR issued the following summary of Shostakovich’s work, drawing attention to a ‘remarkable example of fidelity to the traditions of musical classicism, and above all, to the Russian traditions, finding his inspiration in the reality of Soviet life, reasserting and developing in his creative innovations the art of socialist realism and, in so doing, contributing to universal progressive musical culture’. The Times wrote of him in its obituary that he was beyond doubt ‘the last great symphonist’.
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Sunday, October 27, 2024
Saturday, August 3, 2024
Prokofiev for Beginners: 10 Pieces to Make You Love Prokofiev
by Emily E. Hogstad
Sergei Prokofiev was born on 23 April 1891 in Sontsivka, present-day Ukraine. He became one of the famous rebellious enfant terribles of twentieth-century Russian music.
Sergei Prokofiev
Here are a few facts about his life and career:
- Prokofiev’s music blended steely modernism and traditional Russian character. He often combined dissonance and complex rhythms with more melodic and folk-inspired ideas.
- Prokofiev was a child prodigy who began composing at an early age. When he was accepted into the Moscow Conservatory, he was several years younger than his fellow students. (He would irritate his older peers by keeping track of their mistakes.) He cultivated a reputation as a misfit and a rebel.
- Prokofiev had a complicated relationship with Russia and the Soviet Union. He left his homeland in 1918 after the Russian Revolution but, homesick, returned in 1936. He ran into trouble with Soviet bureaucracy, and his ex-wife was even sent to a gulag after attempting to defect.
- In his later years, his health was poor. Prokofiev died on the same day as Joseph Stalin, so his death received relatively little attention.
Intrigued? Hope so! Here are ten works by Sergei Prokofiev to immerse yourself in his word.
Prokofiev began his first piano concerto as a cocky twenty-year-old.
In 1914 he played this concerto at a piano competition. He figured he probably wouldn’t win if he performed a canonical piano concerto, but he might stand a chance if he entered with an impressive performance of his own little-known work. (And yes, he did in fact win.)
This work is fifteen minutes long and in one movement. It’s dramatic, powerful, spiky, and spicy.
In this work, Prokofiev takes a form that was invented in the late sixteenth century – the toccata – and brings it squarely into the mechanized twentieth.
Toccatas have always been fleet and virtuosic, but in his Toccata, Prokofiev brings those adjectives to another level, never allowing the performer (or the audience) a single moment to breathe. It’s a cold-blooded and deeply satisfying work.
Symphony No. 1 in D Classical, Op. 25 (1916–17)
Many composers are terrified to write their first symphony, given the storied history of the genre and the weight of expectations. Brahms, for example, took over twenty years to write and perfect his.
Young Prokofiev, however, turned those expectations on their head when he breezily wrote his brief but enchanting first symphony, nicknamed the “Classical.”
As the name suggests, this symphony is in a neoclassical style that pays tribute to the works of Haydn and Mozart, while putting a modern spin on the genre.
Sergei Prokofiev in 1900
On April 18, 1918, he wrote a typically confident entry in his diary about the premiere: “Rehearsal of the Classical Symphony with the State Orchestra, I conducted it myself, completely improvising, having forgotten the score and never indeed having studied it from a conducting perspective.”
Despite its composer’s devil-may-care attitude, the premiere was a success.
Violin Concerto No. 1 in D, Op. 19 (1916–17)
Prokofiev’s first violin concerto is like the soundtrack to a twisted fairytale, with long lush lines interplaying with repetitive, machine-like virtuosity.
It was composed against the backdrop of the oncoming Revolution. Despite the turmoil in the streets, 1917 turned into the most creatively productive year of Prokofiev’s life.
In 1918, he departed Russia for America, crossing via the Pacific and arriving in California. He made his way across North America, eventually finding himself in Paris, where his violin concerto was belatedly premiered in 1923.
Unfortunately, Parisian audiences in that particular time and place were hoping for something with a little more avant-garde bite, and the fairytale-like first violin concerto wasn’t their cup of tea. But time has been kind to it, and the concerto remains in the repertoire to this day.
Suite from “Lieutenant Kijé”, Op. 60 (1934)
In 1936, Prokofiev returned permanently to his homeland. However, before the move, he embarked on a series of long visits.
During one of these, he wrote the soundtrack to a film called Lieutenant Kijé, a satire set in 1800 tracing the misadventures of a fictional lieutenant who is created when a clerk mis-writes a name in a ledger.
This was Prokofiev’s first time writing for film, and, typically, he had very specific ideas about how he wanted to go about composing for this new genre. “I somehow had no doubts whatever about the musical language for the film,” he wrote.
The Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra asked Prokofiev to adapt his soundtrack into a full orchestral suite, which he did. The suite remains popular in concert halls today.
Romeo and Juliet Suite No. 2, Op. 64ter (1936)
Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet had a rocky beginning.
One of its choreographers resigned from the Kirov Ballet; the project was then moved to the Bolshoi; government bureaucrats were unconvinced about the ballet’s retooled happy ending; and everyone was generally jumpy after a 1936 Stalinist denunciation of renowned composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Due to these delays, the music was heard before the actual ballet was produced.
That music is, like so much of Prokofiev’s output, both mesmerizing and terrifying. The lumbering bass of the Montagues and Capulets is especially legendary (at 2:45 in the recording above).
Peter and the Wolf, Op. 67 (1936)
One might not have expected this from the infamous enfant terrible of Soviet music, but in 1936, Prokofiev wrote one of the most famous educational works in music history, Peter and the Wolf.
It was commissioned by the director of the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow. She wanted Prokofiev to write a special symphony for children.
The protagonist Peter plays in a meadow, listening to a whole menagerie of animals symbolized by various instruments.
Peter’s grandfather warns him of a gray wolf who might come to attack him. On cue, the wolf makes an appearance, but with the help of his animal friends, Peter is able to catch it.
Hunters come out of the forest, ready to kill the wolf, but Peter convinces them to put the wolf in a cage and bring it to a zoo instead. They do so, in triumphant, animal-parade formation.
The work has proven to be one of the most popular in the entire repertoire and is often used even today as an introduction to the orchestra and orchestral instruments.
War and Peace, Op. 91 (1941–52)
After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Prokofiev teamed up with his new wife, poet/translator Mira Mendelson, to write a massive opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
He submitted a score to the Soviet Union’s Committee of the Arts in 1942. They wanted more patriotism, but Prokofiev was loath to substantially revise the opera, so he sprinkled in some patriotic marches instead.
Despite the changes, full-throated Party support of the opera was never forthcoming, and the massive project gradually lost steam.
Prokofiev would never actually get to see the entire thing fully staged. But it’s still a fascinating glimpse into how he treated large-scale projects and how politics affected art.
Symphony No. 5 in B♭, Op. 100 (1944)
Prokofiev wrote his fifth symphony in 1944, the summer of the Normandy landings. The long war was reaching a turning point, and this was reflected in his fifth symphony.
Publicly, at least, Prokofiev described the work as “a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit.”
He also wrote, “I cannot say that I deliberately chose this theme. It was born in me and clamoured for expression. The music matured within me. It filled my soul.”
At its January 1945 premiere, celebratory artillery was heard in the distance. Prokofiev didn’t begin the performance until the gunfire was over.
Later, the musicians and audience learned that the explosions had been a celebratory signal: Soviet troops had crossed into Germany, signaling a successful invasion. The war ended in Europe a few months later.
Even though this was a work written in a very particular time and place, its themes of overcoming struggle and battered optimism still resonate on a more universal level.
Symphony No. 7, Op. 131 (1951-52)
By the 1950s, Prokofiev’s health was declining. Nevertheless, he still managed one last symphony, his seventh. Somewhat ironically, his final symphonic testament was commissioned by the Soviet Children’s Radio Division.
One can hear a wistful melancholy and a world-weary resignation in this music, even in its more flamboyant passages. The bold aggression of the teenaged Prokofiev has mellowed considerably.
Prokofiev was pushed into altering his work. Originally the ending was quiet and sad. However, a conductor friend told Prokofiev that he should tack on a brief happy ending, which would make him more likely to please bureaucrats and win the Stalin Prize and its 100,000 ruble payout.
Prokofiev reluctantly agreed, but he told the friend, “Slava, you will live much longer than I, and you must take care that this new ending never exists after me.”
Prokofiev’s seventh never won the Stalin Prize, and he died before he could try again with his eighth.
Conclusion
Grave of Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev died on 5 March 1953, about an hour before Joseph Stalin. So many mourners were busy paying tribute to Stalin that his death went largely unnoticed for a long time.
There were no musicians available to play at his funeral, so his family played a recording of his own Romeo and Juliet suite instead. He was sixty-one years old.
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