Ólafsson’s ‘Emperor’ and Prokofiev’s Triumph

About the Work

Beethoven composed his Fifth and final piano concerto in 1809, a year in which Vienna was bombarded and briefly occupied by Napoleon’s army. During the bombardment he sheltered in his brother’s cellar with pillows over his ears to protect what remained of his hearing. There is a grandeur and a defiance in the music that the circumstances seem to have pressed into it. The famous nickname ‘Emperor,’ though, was not Beethoven’s and refers to no particular emperor; its origin is unclear. It was attached later in the English-speaking world, sometimes credited to the pianist-publisher Johann Baptist Cramer, as a tribute to the work’s imperial scale and bearing.

That scale was genuinely new. At around forty minutes, the ‘Emperor’ is far longer than any concerto Beethoven had written before, and it rethinks the relationship between soloist and orchestra. Instead of the customary orchestral introduction followed by the pianist’s entrance, the work opens with three great chords from the orchestra, each answered immediately by a cascade of free, improvisatory flourishes from the piano, as if the soloist were striding onstage and seizing the music before the formalities can begin. Beethoven also broke with tradition by writing out the first-movement cadenza in full and instructing the pianist not to improvise one, a sign of how completely he now wanted to control the architecture of the piece.

By 1809 Beethoven’s deafness had advanced to the point where he could no longer appear as a concerto soloist, and so, for the first time, he did not give the premiere of one of his own piano concertos himself. The work’s first public performance took place in Leipzig on 28 November 1811, with Friedrich Schneider as soloist; the Vienna premiere followed on 12 February 1812, played by Beethoven’s devoted pupil Carl Czerny. The concerto is dedicated to the Archduke Rudolph of Austria: Beethoven’s patron, pupil and friend, and the dedicatee of many of his greatest works. It stands as the magnificent close to his concerto writing: heroic, expansive, and serenely confident.

What to Listen For

The opening is unmistakable. Three weighty orchestral chords, each crowned by a sweeping solo flourish, throw the door open before the movement proper has even begun, a gesture of breathtaking confidence that frames the entire work. When the orchestra finally settles into the main theme, listen for its martial, dotted rhythms and the way Beethoven keeps the music striding forward; the piano, when it returns, decorates and extends rather than merely competes.

The slow movement (Adagio un poco mosso) is one of Beethoven’s most rapt creations: a hushed, hymn-like melody in the remote key of B major, the orchestra muted and prayerful, the piano entering with music of extraordinary tenderness. Then comes the magical hinge of the whole concerto: as the slow movement dies away, the harmony sinks by a semitone, the piano quietly tries out a fragment of a new tune, hesitates, and then suddenly bursts into the exuberant Rondo finale without a break. That dancing, off-beat main theme, hurled out by the soloist, drives the rest of the piece. Keep your ear on the very end, where the music seems to wind down to almost nothing over quiet repeated timpani strokes before the piano and orchestra leap back to life for a jubilant final flourish.

About the Work

Prokofiev wrote his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1944, in about a month at the composers’ retreat near Ivanovo, though ideas for it had been gathering in his sketchbooks for years. He described it as a work ‘glorifying the grandeur of the human spirit.’ After a long and restless career that had taken him from pre-revolutionary St Petersburg to Paris and the United States and finally, in the 1930s, back to the Soviet Union, this was his first symphony in fourteen years, and it arrived at a charged moment. By 1944 the tide of the Second World War had turned in the Soviet Union’s favour, and the symphony’s mood of hard-won strength and forward momentum chimed exactly with a country sensing that victory was at last in reach.

The premiere, on 13 January 1945 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, became the stuff of legend. Prokofiev himself conducted. As he raised his baton, artillery salvos thundered outside, a moment later described by the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who was in the hall. The guns were celebrating the Red Army’s crossing of the Vistula and its advance into Germany. The coincidence sealed the work’s identity as a kind of victory symphony, and it was an immediate triumph, soon carried abroad and quickly established in the international repertoire.

Yet the Fifth is far from simple patriotic rhetoric. It is a big, four-movement symphony in the grand tradition, melodically generous but shadowed throughout by Prokofiev’s characteristic irony and sudden harmonic swerves. Its lyricism can turn grim or grotesque in an instant; its triumph is earned through passages of real darkness. This is Prokofiev at the height of his powers, writing music of broad public statement that never loses the sardonic edge and rhythmic bite that were his alone.

What to Listen For

The symphony opens not with fireworks but with breadth: a spacious Andante in which a long, noble theme unfolds on flute and bassoon, gradually drawing in the whole orchestra. Listen for how Prokofiev builds to a shattering brass-and-percussion climax at the movement’s close: the ‘grandeur of the human spirit’ made audible.

The second movement is a glittering, mechanical scherzo (Allegro marcato), its restless clockwork theme driven by an insistent ostinato. It is brilliant and slightly sinister, full of the toccata-like motion Prokofiev loved, with a quicker central section before the machine grinds back into gear. The slow movement (Adagio) is the symphony’s emotional core, a grieving, wide-spanning lament whose beauty repeatedly clouds over into something darker and more anguished; here the war’s cost seems to be felt directly.

The finale begins with a hushed backward glance at the symphony’s opening before launching a bustling, good-humoured Allegro giocoso, the cellos setting off a jaunty tune. Keep listening past the high spirits: in the closing pages the music accelerates and the orchestra’s gleam takes on a harsh, almost manic glint, strings whirring and percussion clattering, so that the final triumph arrives with a steely, ambiguous edge entirely characteristic of Prokofiev.