An Argument at the Piano and a Child’s Heaven

About the Work

Sergei Prokofiev carried the ideas for his Third Piano Concerto around for years before he wrote it down. The earliest sketches go back to 1913, when he wrote a theme with variations and put it aside, and he returned to the material in 1916 and 1917. By the time he finished the piece he had left Russia and was living between the United States and western Europe. The concerto was finally put together in the summer of 1921 at Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, a village on the coast of Brittany.

Staying nearby that summer was the Russian poet Konstantin Balmont, whose verses Prokofiev set in the same year as his five songs, Op. 36. Balmont heard the composer play parts of the concerto and answered with a sonnet. The score is dedicated to him.

Prokofiev was the soloist at the first performance, on 16 December 1921 in Chicago, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock, a conductor who had taken up his music early. Early American audiences were more puzzled than delighted, and it was in Europe, beginning with a performance in Paris under Serge Koussevitzky in 1922, that the piece caught on. It became one of the works Prokofiev relied on for his own concert tours, and in 1932 he recorded it in London with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Of his five piano concertos, the Third is the most often played. It lasts a little under half an hour, has three movements of similar length, and keeps the brilliant keyboard writing of the two earlier concertos while giving the orchestra a fuller share of the argument.

What to Listen For

The concerto opens quietly. A solo clarinet plays a long, unhurried melody, the orchestra joins in, and then the strings start to scurry upwards until the piano bursts in at full speed. A second idea arrives with a drier, more sarcastic edge, with dissonances and a strutting rhythm. Midway through, the opening clarinet melody returns in the full orchestra, and the piano decorates it before the fast music takes over again and races to the end.

The middle movement is a theme with five variations, unusual in a concerto. The orchestra alone states the theme, a prim little dance in the manner of a gavotte. The piano’s first variation begins with a long trill and a run up the keyboard. The second and third are fast and rhythmically spiky, with accents pushed off the beat. The fourth is the still centre of the piece, a slow, dreamlike exchange between piano and orchestra. The fifth is energetic, and at the end the theme comes back at its original pace in the orchestra while the piano skitters around it.

Prokofiev called the finale an argument between piano and orchestra. Bassoons and plucked strings propose a theme, the piano cuts in with its own, and the two keep contradicting each other. Then the woodwinds bring a broad, lyrical melody, which the piano at first seems to mock and then takes up at full volume. The closing pages are the hardest in the work, a contest of speed that ends on a loud chord of C major.

About the Work

Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony grew backwards from its ending. In 1892 he wrote a song for voice and orchestra, “Das himmlische Leben” (“The Heavenly Life”), on a text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the collection of German folk poetry that fed much of his early music. The poem is a child’s picture of heaven: there is dancing and singing, the saints look after the kitchen, and nobody goes hungry. For a time Mahler meant the song to close his enormous Third Symphony. He took it out again, although traces of it remain in that work, and kept it for something else.

That something else came in the summers of 1899 and 1900. Mahler had been director of the Vienna Court Opera since 1897, and the summer holidays were the only time he had to compose. He began the new symphony in July 1899 at Bad Aussee and finished it in August 1900 at Maiernigg on the Wörthersee, a few weeks after his fortieth birthday. He wrote three movements that lead towards the song, so that fragments of it are heard along the way and the finale sounds like a destination reached. He thought of the song as both the source of the symphony and its goal.

The Fourth is the last of the three symphonies that draw on the Wunderhorn songs, and it is much the smallest of them. It lasts under an hour, and the orchestra has no trombones and no tuba. Mahler uses a large ensemble for colour and almost never all at once.

He conducted the first performance in Munich on 25 November 1901 with the Kaim Orchestra and the soprano Margarete Michalek. The audience, which had expected something like the monumental Second Symphony, did not know what to make of it, and the press in the German cities where it was played that winter was largely hostile. Mahler went on retouching the orchestration for years afterwards.

What to Listen For

The symphony begins with sleigh bells and flutes and then relaxes into an easy-going melody for the violins. The first movement keeps to a classical outline, and the tunes come one after another, light on their feet. The sleigh bells return several times as a kind of marker, and they will come back in the finale.

The second movement is a scherzo that Mahler first headed “Freund Hein spielt auf”: Friend Hein, a folk-tale name for Death, strikes up on his fiddle. The leader of the orchestra plays a second violin tuned a whole tone higher than normal, which gives it a thin, harsh edge, like a village fiddle. Alma Mahler connected the idea with Arnold Böcklin’s self-portrait, in which Death plays the violin at the painter’s ear. The effect is more uncanny than frightening, and twice a gentler trio pushes the fiddler aside.

The slow movement, which Mahler thought the best he had written, is a set of variations on a calm melody, interrupted twice by a lament in the minor. The variations get shorter and more restless until, near the end, the whole orchestra bursts out in a blaze of E major, as if a door had been thrown open. Then the music settles again.

The finale follows quietly. The soprano sings the Wunderhorn song with the simplicity of a child telling a story, and between the verses the sleigh bells rush in again, now with some bite. The last verse, about the music of heaven, turns to E major, and the symphony ends there, very quietly.