Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 3

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C

1. Andante - Allegro (C major)
2. Tema con variazioni (E minor)
3. Allegro, ma non troppo (C major)

Prokofiev was above all a practical composer who rarely let an idea go to waste. While most of the themes used in his Third Piano Concerto were conceived for it, some were leftovers from abandoned projects - two themes that appear in the finale, for instance, began life as sketches for a string quartet. He noted down the first ideas in 1913 in Russia, but most of the work was done between 1917 and 1921. By this time he had fled Russia in the wake of the revolution and was based in Paris. Once he had amassed enough ideas, it was simply a matter of crafting them into a convincing whole.

In 1921, after debuts in Paris and London, Prokofiev spent most of the spring and summer in the village of St. Brevin-les-Pins in Brittany. Here he had for the first time since leaving Russia a sense of calm and happiness, and work progressed well on his current composition projects: his Opera The Fiery Angel, a collection of songs, and his Third Piano Concerto. His ballet The Love for Three Oranges was due to be performed in Chicago, as was the new concerto, and Diaghilev was planning to employ him for another ballet score. All in all his prospects looked good.

He discovered that another Russian emigre,the poet Konstantin Balmont, was living nearby. The acquaintance soon became a friendship and a creative partnership. Prokofiev wrote a song-cycle on his poems. Balmont, who had fallen on hard times and was immensely cheered to make Prokofiev’s acquaintance, wrote a sonnet in response to the new concerto after Prokofiev played parts of it through to him on the “horrible upright piano” (his wife’s description) on which he was composing it. Prokofiev returned the compliment by dedicating the concerto to the poet.

The premiere came in Chicago in December 1921. “My Third Concerto has turned out to be devilishly difficult, “ he wrote to his friend Serge Koussevitsky’s wife and secretary Natalia a few days before. “I’m nervous and I’m practising hard three hours a day.” The American critics received the new concerto positively if not wildly enthusiastically; the concerto began to attain the phenomenal popularity that it still enjoys only after European and Russian audiences had heard it.

Prokofiev was working hard to establish himself in the West as a soloist, and had made successful debuts in Paris and London. But there was competition in the form of another expatriate, Sergei Rachmaninoff. It is perhaps not too fanciful to imagine that the new concerto’s melodicism and simplicity was Prokofiev's attempt to take on Rachmaninoff on his own terms. (Meanwhile, Prokofiev's rising profile as a composer in America would similarly influence Rachmaninoff to adopt a more abrasive style in his later music.) “Let the maestro be calm”, he wrote to Koussevitzky, with whom he would often perform it. “This is not a Stravinsky symphony - there are no complicated meters, no dirty tricks. It can be conducted without special preparation - it is difficult for the orchestra, but not for the conductor.”

Adams: Harmonielehre

John Adams (b. 1947)

Harmonielehre


1. Part I (Untitled)

2. Part II: The Anfortas Wound

3. Part III: Meister Eckhardt and Quackie


Harmonielehre takes its title from a book written in 1911 by Arnold Schoenberg. It is far more than simply a student’s textbook: as well as an exhaustive treatise laying out the full extent of traditional tonal harmony, it is also a philosophical rumination on that tradition. It was written at a crucial point in Schonberg’s career, when he was in the process of abandoning the very tradition that he exhaustively documents in his book. Although usually translated as “Theory of Harmony”, the title’s literal translation, “Harmony Book”, perhaps better reflects its author’s approach. Schoenberg is dismissive of abstract theory, insisting that knowledge of composition must be learned not by absorbing received wisdom, but through practical experience. “If I should succeed in teaching the pupil the handicraft of our art as completely as a carpenter can teach his,” he writes, “then I shall be satisfied.”

Although John Adams’ Harmonielehre sounds little like anything Schoenberg wrote, it is fundamentally connected to him, and to Adams’ ambivalence about him. One of Adams’ teachers at Harvard, Leon Kirchner, had studied with Schoenberg in the 1940s. Although he was not interested in Schoenberg’s compositional innovations, Kirchner nevertheless inherited his teacher’s high seriousness, and in turn transmitted it to his own pupil. For Adams, Schoenberg stands as a Master in the lineage of Bach and Beethoven. Adams is attracted to this notion of the “Great Composer”, and admires and loves Schoenberg (and could be heard recently on Radio 4 vigorously defending him from an attack by Howard Goodall). However, he feels uneasy about what he sees as Schoenberg's adoption of a “priestly” role, taking 19th-century individualism to an extreme. He also faced a contradiction between his awe of Schoenberg’s persona, and the fact that he found much of his music unattractive. By day Adams and his fellow pupils would enthuse over the revolutionary scores of the European avant-garde; by night Adams returned to his rooms to play Jimi Hendrix records.

After he graduated, Adams rejected the high modernism that held sway in academia. Instead he turned to a style that in its own way was just as revolutionary: Minimalism. The primary features of this music were the exact things that Schoenberg’s disciples went out of their way to avoid: regular pulses, repetition, and explicit tonality. This would hardly raise an eyebrow now, even in American universities, but in the 60s and 70s to use such techniques was tantamount to a declaration of war on the academic establishment.

While taking up much of the sounds and textures of minimalist music, Adams nevertheless remained in many ways attached to the traditional concert-hall, and wanted not simply to reject Schoenberg as an influence, but to settle his relationship with him. In the early 80s he wrote a number of works that address Schoenberg’s legacy directly: in his Chamber Symphony, he parodies the hyperactive late-romantic style of early Schoenberg by juxtaposing it with cartoon-like music. Harmonielehre is also a parody, but in an older sense of the word: Adams uses a number of key works from the early 20th century, particularly Schoenberg’s cantata Gurrelieder and Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, as bases on which his own music is built, fusing their harmonies and expression with Adams’s minimalist-derived technique. Adams makes it clear that here no irony is intended.

All three movements take further inspiration from dreams and concepts from psychoanalysis. Adams has a long-standing interest in the ideas of Carl Jung, and Schoenberg as a resident of early 20th-century Vienna was likewise fascinated by the then new ideas of Freud about the role of the subconscious. The pounding chords that open and close Part One are inspired by a dream Adams had in which he “watched a gigantic supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket.” In contrast to the vigorous ouster sections, Adams describes the central part of the movement as a “Sehnsucht”. This German word is generally translated as “yearning”, but this does not convey the full force of its meaning. C.S. Lewis perhaps came closer when he defined it as “an inconsolable longing in the human heart, for we know not what.”

Anfortas, King of the Knights who protected the Holy Grail, suffered a self-inflicted wound from his spear, which would not heal. Anfortas is an example of a Jungian archetype; a mythical figure which stands for a personality trait. He represents a condition of depression which the patient feels incapable of escaping, and which hence becomes self-perpetuating and debilitating. Here Adams has in mind early 20th-century angst; in an interview with the New Yorker columnist Alex Ross, Adams describes Schoenberg “like some religious zealot cutting off his genitals to prove how totally pure he is, how dedicated to the Lord.” Part Two alludes to such music, particularly Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony, and at its climax, screams in evocation of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony.

In utter contrast, the opening of Part Three floats in bright light. The title (“Zappa-ish”, in the composer’s words) refers to another dream of Adams’s, in which he saw his daughter (briefly known as “Quackie” as a baby) flying on the shoulders of the medieval theologian, mystic and accused blasphemer Meister Eckhardt, “as they hover among the heavenly bodies like figures painted on the high ceilings of old cathedrals.” Perhaps Eckhardt here is an avatar for Adams himself, questioning and rejecting elements of the academic truths he inherited. The music builds to a triumphant climax which may seem a definitive rejection of Schoenberg. But in forging his own path, Adams has remained true to Schoenberg’s ideals: “Had I told [my pupils] merely what I know, then they would have known just that and nothing more. As it is, they know perhaps even less. But they do know what matters: the search itself!”