Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100

Program notes

About the Work

Prokofiev wrote his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1944 at Ivanovo, north-east of Moscow, where the Union of Soviet Composers kept a country estate as a retreat for its members. He was there with Mira Mendelson, later his second wife, and found it idyllic: a large quiet room, good food and a forest in new leaf. The piano score was done in about a month. Some of the themes had been waiting in his notebooks for years, but it was fourteen years since he had finished a symphony, and this was the first he had written since moving back to the Soviet Union for good in the 1930s.

The war had turned by then. The Red Army was driving the Germans back, and the Allies had landed in Normandy in June. Prokofiev said that he thought of the symphony as a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers and his pure and noble spirit, and added that he had not chosen the theme deliberately: it had been born in him and clamoured for expression.

He conducted the first performance himself in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on 13 January 1945. The pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who was in the audience, remembered that as Prokofiev raised his baton an artillery salute began to thunder outside, and that he stood waiting with his arms up until the guns fell silent. The salvoes, it is said, were announcing a Red Army advance. The symphony was an immediate success at home and, within months, abroad, and it marked the height of his standing in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.

How far the piece is the straightforward celebration its composer described has been argued over ever since. Its breadth and confidence are real, but so are the grinding dissonances at its climaxes and the manic edge of its fast music. Listeners can decide for themselves.

What to Listen For

First movement. Unusually, the symphony opens with a slow movement, or at least a broad one. Flute and bassoon, an octave apart, play a calm rising melody, and the rest of the movement grows from it and from a second, more yearning tune for flute and oboe. Prokofiev thickens the sound by stages. In the coda the opening theme returns with the whole orchestra, tam-tam, bass drum and piano behind it, in one of the loudest and heaviest passages he ever wrote.

Second movement. The scherzo comes second. Over a ticking accompaniment in the violins the clarinet plays a jaunty, slightly sour tune that is passed around the orchestra. The middle section is a swaying dance framed by a woodwind call. When the opening returns it does so slowly and menacingly, low in the brass, and then accelerates until it is racing.

Third movement. The slow movement is the emotional centre. A long melody in the woodwind rises over a rocking figure in the strings, and the violins take it into their highest register. The middle of the movement darkens into something like a funeral march, with harsh trills and a climax of real violence, before the first melody comes back and the music ebbs away.

Fourth movement. A quiet introduction looks back to the opening of the symphony, with the cellos, divided into parts, recalling its first theme. Then the violas set up a chugging rhythm and the clarinet launches the main tune, cheeky and athletic. The mood is festive for most of the way. In the last minute the celebration becomes mechanical and shrill; suddenly the full orchestra drops out, leaving a handful of solo strings scrubbing away with percussion and piano, and one last crescendo slams the door.