A Symphony of Celebration: Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, and more

The original version of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto caused a minor uproar at its 1913 premiere: one eternally quotable heckler reportedly shouted, “To hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!” A contemporary newspaper account described audience members as “frozen with fright, hair standing on end.” Adding insult to injury, the only copy of the score was destroyed in a fire during the Russian Revolution, which meant that Prokofiev had to reconstruct the composition entirely by memory a decade after he first committed it to paper, making his Second Piano Concerto also, in a sense, his Fourth, as he explained to friends at the time.

We can’t compare the version we know today to the original, so we’ll have to trust Prokofiev’s judgment that the 1923 reconstruction was an improvement. By that point, he had played the concerto a few times in concert before setting it aside, so he knew its strengths and weaknesses. He had also finished his Third Concerto by that point—which remains far more popular than the Second, although nearly as demanding on a technical level and had matured as a stylist, relying less on shock-and-awe stunts and more on emotional depth and psychological complexity. He was a better contrapuntist, too, a point he emphasized when comparing the two iterations of the concerto. He also noted that he made “the form more graceful—less square.” Prokofiev debuted the new version in Paris, in May 1924, with himself as soloist and Serge Koussevitzky at the podium.

Prokofiev had finished the first version of the Second Piano Concerto as a 22-year-old undergraduate, a self-styled enfant terrible. He dedicated it to his closest friend at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, Max Schmidthof, whom Prokofiev respected for his knowledge and discernment. Prokofiev recorded in his diary that he played parts of the concerto for Schmidthof: “He likes the third movement and especially the first movement cadenza. The Finale elicited vociferous approval; I had to repeat the opening theme three times.”

Sadly, not long after Prokofiev finished the concerto and before the 1913 premiere, Schmidthof took a train into a forest in Finland and shot himself, after mailing Prokofiev and one other person a copy of his suicide note. He was reportedly distraught over the ruinous debt that he had accumulated, which had left him and his mother destitute. “I am writing to tell you the latest news,” he announced. “I have shot myself….The reasons are unimportant.”

The Composer Speaks
“Following the violent concluding chord there was silence in the hall for a few moments. Then boos and catcalls were answered with loud applause, thumping of canes and calls for ‘encore.’ I came out twice to acknowledge the reception, hearing cries of approval and boos coming from the hall. I was pleased that the concerto provoked such strong feelings in the audience.”
—Prokofiev (from a diary entry describing the 1913 premiere)

“I come out to play in a more or less calm frame of mind. But I do not manage to stay calm during the most difficult parts: in the cadenza (specifically where I mark colossale), and at the beginning of the third movement, where the hands keep jumping over one another, I play badly. However, the rest I play well and with enthusiasm.”
—Prokofiev (from a diary entry describing a 1927 performance of the reconstructed concerto).

A Closer Listen
The Second Piano Concerto is notoriously difficult, so demanding from a technical perspective that many of the world’s finest virtuosos won’t attempt it. Even the great Martha Argerich has never performed it. Big and blustery, it comes in like a lion and goes out like a bigger, badder lion, strutting its apex-predator stuff all the while. But amid all the panic-inducing passagework and grand chordal intrigue, Prokofiev gives us subtle, often sardonic moments, too, infused with Gallic wit and neoclassical panache. Sometimes, as with the hypnotic hollow bell tones in the Finale: Allegro tempestoso, he almost seems to predict the tintinnabular music of Arvo Pärt.

Scored for an enormous orchestra and set in four movements instead of the conventional three, the Second Piano Concerto isn’t just a workout for overachieving concertizers, although it’s certainly that, insofar as it would be impossible for a second-rate pianist to pull off. Beyond the terrifying technical demands, it requires a great deal of interpretive finesse, not only from the soloist but also from each member of the orchestra. Take the second-movement scherzo, which goes from delicate Messiaen-esque excursions to pianistic proto-punk, pounding out a punishing onslaught of block chords and infernally fast runs in a mere six or so minutes of constant motion. Although the first version of the concerto was completed before the dedicatee’s tragic suicide, it’s tempting to interpret Prokofiev’s score as the raw transcription of the grief process, ticking off all of its excruciating, overlapping, and recurring stages, from rage to misery, denial and stunned acceptance. Whatever the impetus, this concerto sounds too harrowing to be a showpiece. Despite moments of unadulterated lyricism, as in the tender, folk-inflected secondary themes of the outer movements, it’s more exorcism than elegy.

-René Spencer Saller