Symphony No. 1

By the time his 10 years as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory were over, Sergei Prokofiev had established a reputation for being a dangerous modernist as a composer. He was also known as a brash performer on piano, with a taste for violent, percussive sounds. His first two piano concertos, both performed in St. Petersburg, aroused the alarm of critics. 

Prokofiev’s encounters with the ballet scores that Igor Stravinsky created for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes — The Firebird, Pétrouchka, and The Rite of Spring — brought out even more modernistic tendencies. The ballet he wrote for Diaghilev in 1915, Chout (although it was not performed at the time), and his 1916 opera The Gambler reinforced this energetic, impulsive, and propulsive “bad boy” image. 

Taking a summer break in 1916, Prokofiev decided to try writing in a style as different as he could imagine from that of his recent music. He worked with pencil and paper, rather than sitting at his piano as he was accustomed. Utilizing an orchestral ensemble similar in size to Joseph Haydn’s symphonies from more than a century previous, he came up with four short movements. The music’s harmony and rhythm are surprisingly Classical, a certain grace — hitherto missing in his music — predominant. 

Prokofiev expected to be derided for “contaminating the pure classical pearls with horrible Prokofievish dissonances,” but also knew that his true admirers would see that the style of the symphony was “precisely Mozartian classicism.” 

In the chaotic months after the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Prokofiev managed to put on a concert in what was then called Petrograd (and would soon be renamed Leningrad), in which he appeared as conductor for the first time. The new “Classical” Symphony was a great success. (Though when Prokofiev later conducted his symphony in New York, he was bewildered — as anyone might be — when critics complained that it lacked “grace and melody.”) A month later, Prokofiev traveled east across Russia to Japan and then to the United States, quite unaware that he would not go back to Russia for 18 years. 

The instruments in the “Classical” Symphony may be the same as those Haydn used, but Prokofiev writes for them with much more freedom, for example, in his showcasing of the top range of the flute and in the intricate writing for strings.

The first movement is more or less obedient to Classical form, set in a tight sonata form, but musically, the Larghetto second movement reminds us of Borodin’s Nocturne when the violins enter with a soaring melody that Haydn and Mozart could not have dreamed of. On the other hand, the Gavotta third movement is a throwback to the Baroque era, though the gavotte as a dance was already obsolete by the time Haydn started writing symphonies. (Listeners familiar with Prokofiev’s output will recognize that he later reused this short dance movement in Act I of his ballet Romeo and Juliet, when the guests are leaving the Capulet ball.) 

The Finale is a virtuoso piece that taxes the most expert orchestras, especially at top speed — the tempo is marked Molto vivace — but it is hard to imagine that its scintillating exchanges between wind and strings could ever be seen as anything other than exhilarating. 

Though his “Classical” Symphony was intended as a spoof and commentary, Prokofiev unwittingly unleashed a popular style of modern music that endured for half a century, now referred to as “neoclassicism” and spearheaded by Stravinsky once he had turned his back on the excesses of The Rite of Spring. Not only did Prokofiev inspire others to invoke the discipline and moderation of the Classical style, he drew out of himself a vein of charm and simplicity that leavened many of his youthful, brutalist inclinations. Here, in prototype, he created a new idealism or personal voice, from which he would achieve a perfect balance of old and new in such works as his future ballets Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet. 

— Hugh Macdonald 

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.