Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 25, ‘Classical’

Program notes

About the Work

Sergei Prokofiev began his first numbered symphony in 1916 and finished the score on 10 September 1917, in the months between Russia’s two revolutions. He spent that summer in the countryside outside Petrograd, away from the street fighting in the city, and set himself an experiment. Until then he had always composed at the piano. This time he decided to write without one, working the music out in his head, on the theory that orchestral colours imagined directly would come out cleaner and more transparent.

The model was Haydn. Prokofiev was not attempting a pastiche: the idea was to write the kind of symphony Haydn might have written had he been alive in 1917, keeping the proportions, the small orchestra and the wit of the eighteenth century while letting his own harmonic habits slip in. Themes that begin innocently in one key sidestep into a neighbouring one and come back as if nothing had happened. The name ‘Classical’ was his own choice, and programme writers have generally heard the piece as an affectionate tribute rather than a parody.

One movement gave him trouble. In June 1917 he threw out his first finale as too heavy and wrote a new one, setting himself the rule that it should avoid minor chords altogether. He conducted the first performance himself in Petrograd in April 1918.

The symphony is scored for the orchestra of Haydn’s late years: pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, with timpani and strings. It lasts about fifteen minutes, which makes it the shortest of his seven symphonies.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro. A rising flourish and the first theme is off, in D major, and within a few bars has already jumped to a key where it has no business being. Notice how light the textures are: nothing is doubled that does not need to be.

II. Larghetto. In A major, a long, high violin melody floats over a gently ticking accompaniment. It is the one place where the symphony stops joking.

III. Gavotte: Non troppo allegro. Where Haydn would have put a minuet, Prokofiev puts an older, heavier-footed court dance. It is over in little more than a minute. Listen for the wide octave leaps in the tune and the way the harmony lurches sideways before landing back in D.

IV. Finale: Molto vivace. The replacement finale, built almost entirely from major chords, races along with scales and repeated notes passed between strings and woodwind. The flutes and the violins have the hardest time of it.