Prokofiev’s Second Symphony is a magnificent example of the craze for “machine music” that gripped composers in the 1920s. While musical depictions of a train whistle or the sound of an engine chugging had been represented in songs and piano pieces since their invention, the idea of noise as an aesthetic concept belongs wholly to the period after World War I, when mechanisms of progress and industrialization—including airplanes, motor cars, and factories—suddenly provided modernist composers with fresh sources of inspiration.
Machine music was, in many ways, in direct conflict with the ideals of 19th-century Romanticism and turn-of-the-century impressionism. Its deliberate noisiness and its inescapably rhythmic beat were intoxicating elements—and a direct answer against earlier, lusher music. In Italy, composers explored non-musical noises, including foghorns, sirens, and whistles. Soviet composers were encouraged to applaud the work of hydroelectric dams and large-scale machines in the guise of orchestral music. In France, where Prokofiev was based during the decade, musicians favored making traditional instruments imitate clocks, hammers, and other mechanical tools. Maurice Ravel wrote an article titled “Finding Tunes in Factories.”
American composer George Antheil toured London, Berlin, and Paris from 1922 to 1923, giving concerts that featured his compositions Mechanisms and Airplane Sonata. At the same time, Swiss composer Arthur Honegger was completing Pacific 231, which represents a mighty steam locomotive getting up to speed and braking to a halt. It first “pulled out of the station” at a concert in Paris on May 8, 1924, under the baton of Serge Koussevitzky, who would also lead the premiere of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2.
Directly inspired by Honegger as well as new musical ideas and experimentation, Prokofiev composed his Second Symphony, describing it as a work “of iron and steel.” The music was clearly influenced by the era’s fascination with mechanistic rhythm and brutal noisiness. This is music that is exhilarating and exciting. Its unrelenting rhythm, heavy textures, and loudness are reinforced by intense dissonance, with crunching harmony high in the trumpets, low in the trombones, or everywhere all at once. All in all, it is a virtuoso performance in audacity and cheek.
Much of the point was to signal that this is modern music. The year was 1925, and this was Prokofiev proving that he could be more advanced, or brutally noisy and clangy-bangy, than Stravinsky—that he too could shock the intelligentsia as well as the bourgeoisie.
Of course, not even in the first movement can the heavy artillery keep firing throughout. There is a very short moment where the tempo slackens, and later, some longer moments where the texture thins. Yet with only one or two prominent thematic ideas—a downward glissando in the trumpets, the octave leaps in the violins—the music is powered not by conventional melody and keys, but by power itself.
Why Prokofiev chose to model the second movement as a theme and variations is a mystery, for although it provides some welcome repose after the bludgeoning of the first movement, the new mood does not last—and soon again every opportunity for renewed violence is seized. (Some commentators have suggested Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Op. 111, provided a model in key structure and the use of a theme-and-variations format. Franz Welser-Möst says he is reminded of another Beethoven sonata—the “Hammerklavier,” Op. 106—for the kind of wild and audacious experimentation pursued in these two pieces.)
The musical theme of the second movement, begun by the oboe, is long and elegant, not unlike some motifs in Prokofiev’s later symphonies. Its comfortable harmony is welcome. In the first variation, the theme is heard in the lower strings, with delicate counterpoints wandering above and below it. The second variation is more inventive with some remarkable textures in the strings. In the third variation, a quicker tempo is reached. There are hints of forceful dissonance, but the temperature is largely under restraint.
The fourth variation is a beautiful Larghetto. This is the last chance for our ears to enjoy a peaceful resolution, because the fifth variation brings back madcap activity and crunching dissonance. Things intensify even more in the sixth variation, which builds to the most overwhelmingly brutal climax of all. In the midst of such turmoil, the theme is still heard, shouted out by trumpets and horns. This return of the theme offers much-needed consolation, and the music ends on a magically mysterious chord in the strings, played pianissimo.
Like Prokofiev’s Second Symphony, Webern’s only symphony was composed in the wildly exploratory 1920s, and both works are in two movements, the second being a set of variations. In every other respect, they could not be more different. Where the Prokofiev is heavily scored, brutally noisy, and thickly textured, the Webern is scored for a tiny orchestra, never far from silence, and thin to a vanishing point. Where the Prokofiev is prodigally repetitive, the Webern is microscopically concentrated.
What the listener hears in Webern’s Symphony and what the analyst can read in the score might seem to be worlds apart, although the composer would argue that the strict technical structure of the work accounts for its aesthetic effect. The most obvious feature is the isolation of notes, so that players generally have a space before and after each note and a pitch interval, sometimes very wide, between two consecutive notes. Every note is audible, and every note has a value, which it could not enjoy in a larger, fuller work. The pulse changes frequently.
While the choice and sequence of notes is strictly organized according to the 12-tone technique following the pioneering example of Schoenberg, Webern’s revered teacher, the composer’s work is not done there. He still has to determine the length, timing, dynamics, and attack mode of every note; the tempo and its alternations; and the general mood of the piece. A single pitch, such as a D-flat, can be sounded at any octave.
Such an approach does not require a Mahlerian timespan. Webern says all he has to say in 10 minutes, and the music makes a striking impression since it seems to negate all the assumptions behind traditional concepts of melody and harmony. Hearing it for the first time is like one’s first encounter with abstract art: It creates its own world of musical experience, to be judged on its own terms.
Both movements are short, the first twice as long as the second. The first movement is in two repeated sections, ranging more widely in pitch and dynamics in the second half. Brief silences intervene from time to time. The second movement is a series of variations on a theme that begins with pairs of repeated notes and itself lasts only about 12 seconds. The variations run on from each other without breaks, the speed varying from one to the next. In a sense, the whole work is built as a series of variations, since the same 12-note series is applied throughout.
On paper (for the technically inclined), this work can be resolved into the rigorous application of a specially constructed symmetrical series of 12 notes, the second six of which are an inversion of the first six. The first movement is also a series of interlocking canons, which can be heard at the opening since the first three notes on the second horn are echoed in inversion by the first horn, a process that is elaborated throughout the movement. Furthermore, the first movement is mirrored around a point at the start of the second half, so that the music from that moment is played backward, ending on the isolated notes with which it began, an inaudible effect since the timbre, pitch, and spacing of the notes are now quite different.
Webern marked each note with meticulous directions on how it is to be played. It is clear that he worked with extreme precision and care, like a watchmaker, and he worked extremely slowly. The brevity and fierce concentration of this music has never been equaled.
Prokofiev’s seven symphonies represent nearly every phase of his diversely active life. The momentous events experienced by all Russians in the first half of the 20th century coincided with his own half-century as a composer, yet oddly enough, not one of his seven symphonies stands out as distinctly Russian in the way that Tchaikovsky’s or Rachmaninoff’s symphonies do.
Prokofiev’s First Symphony, the “Classical” Symphony, was deliberately different from anything written in Russia (or anywhere else) at that time, exploring a modern take on a Haydn symphony and anticipating Stravinsky’s radical neoclassicism. The Second took its cue from the craze for noisy machine music popular in Italy and France. The Third and Fourth symphonies were salvaged from stage works that had not found success on the stage: the opera The Fiery Angel and the ballet The Prodigal Son.
The last three symphonies are immediately recognizable as his work, with the Fifth particularly prized for its tunefulness and athletic energy. It was composed in 1944, but it is not a war-torn work. It is a purely symphonic one, reflective and introspective at times, but primarily a vehicle for the composer’s exultant delight in his own composition.
Prokofiev accepts the classical pattern of four contrasted movements, and within those movements draws on classical sonata and rondo forms (first and last movements) and ternary A-B-A form (second and third movements). Themes from the first movement are heard from time to time later in the symphony, sometimes modified or disguised. The abundance of melody is self-evident, with the composer’s fondness for themes that reach upward in aspiration and promise; he also presents themes at two levels, an octave apart, or, as in the slow movement, two octaves apart. This can be heard on clarinet with bass clarinet, violins with cello support, and in other combinations.
The first and third movements move at a stately pace, broad in design and expression, while the second and fourth movements remind us of Prokofiev’s great gift as a composer of ballet. Spiky rhythms and astringent harmonies suggest dance and, often, a sly sense of humor. The composer calls for a large orchestra, used with constant virtuosity. The piano supplies rhythmic accents, supported by judicious percussion. The trumpets blare out strong melodies. A special moment comes at the beginning of the last movement, when, in a gradual disengagement from the slow movement, the tempo is still unhurried. Cellos divided into four sections quietly recall the opening theme of the symphony before a wily clarinet presents the main rondo theme of the finale.
The symphony was well received at its first performance in 1945, as was his Sixth a year later. But Prokofiev’s health deteriorated soon after, and any euphoria the composer might have felt at the time was thrown to the winds when, in February 1948, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party issued a warning to musicians against “formalist and antipopular tendencies,” singling out Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and several others for writing music that was “antidemocratic and foreign to the Soviet people and its artistic tastes.”
For the rest of his life (which ended, as fate would have it, on the same day as Stalin’s), Prokofiev worked under the shadow of official disapproval, the hardship it caused, and his failing health. Nevertheless, he produced a Seventh Symphony in 1952, full of nostalgia and melancholy, but lacking the personal conviction and the sense of joy that propels the Fifth Symphony.
—Hugh Macdonald