Music About Animals, Day 3 – Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev

This week’s theme is…Music About Animals!  Our animated companions on Earth, animals have been our friends, food, foes, and fascination.  They constantly populate the art of humans, from literature to sculpture, poetry to music.  This week we listen to music inspired in some way by animals.

Music About Animals, Day 3 – Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev

A great Suzuki teacher I know once summed up the famous Suzuki Method by saying something to the effect of “All the pieces in the Suzuki repertoire are etudes, cleverly designed as musical pieces so that children will want to play them.”  It’s a great insight, and on many levels.  It is largely true about the Suzuki Method, and you can read more about how that is structured in this post.  Etude is French for “exercise” or “study”.  It usually refers to a piece of music that has some kind of pedagogical benefit for the performer, typically strengthening a specific skill through its study and performance.  A great composer will craft etudes that are not only useful for building skills, but also musically satisfying for both performer and audience.  It is for this reason that the etudes of composers like Chopin, Paganini, Liszt and Debussy still grace the programs of concerts and recitals, almost two centuries after many of them were composed.

On a broader level, the Suzuki teacher’s observation can be generalized to be “learning is always more effect when it is fun and motivating”.  I think we all know this, and we love the teachers who internalize this sensibility, creating educational experiences that are fascinating, engaging, captivating, colorful, and more.  We will always be driven to learn more, achieve more, and master more skills than we would otherwise given the right approach to learning, be it the right assignment, the right carrot dangled before us, or the right presentation.  Lots of people know, and have known this, including a prominent Russian composer of the twentieth century, Sergei Prokofiev.  He crafted an educational piece that is so engaging that I only recently realized it was composed with a pedagogical intention.  The piece is probably his most famous work, even among adults, even though it was composed for children.  It is Peter and the Wolf.

In 1936 Prokofiev returned to Russia after extended stays in the United States and France.  Composing prolifically, he and the other Soviet composers were just started to get a taste of the oppressive authority that the governing powers would hold over their heads, the threat of censorship and denunciation always in the air.  Prokofiev actually managed to weather this with minimal stress over the course of his life and career – one of his colleagues was not so lucky (see this post and this one).  The Russian regime was just beginning to find its legs, exercising its authoritarian will, having been established in the late 1910s after the revolution which ended almost 400 years of tsardom.  Prokofiev lived through that, and returned to Russia as the Great Depression was causing economic stagnation throughout the Western world.  In the midst of all of this geopolitical drama, Prokofiev managed to pen three of his most lighthearted works, all for children.  There are the 12 delightful piano miniatures for children of 1935:

 

There are the Three Children’s Songs of 1936, including this charming middle song, setting a Russian text about lollipops:

 

And 1936 also saw the creation of Prokofiev’s most famous and enduring work for children, a fairy tale which is actually an orchestration lesson for children in disguise.  After his return to Russian, Prokofiev was approached by Natalia Satz, herself a composer, and, at the time, director of Moscow’s Central Children’s Theater.  

Natalia Satz

The commission must have excited and animated Prokofiev: he poured all his powers of invention into bringing the story to life in only four days!

What always impresses me about Peter and the Wolf is just how well Prokofiev captures the distinctive idiosyncrasies of all the animals he represents throughout.  I find the cat especially captivating, but they are all very well done, and cast in Prokofiev’s distinctive, forceful Bolshevik musical voice.

 

Peter and the Wolf was the first piece of Prokofiev I ever heard (like so many other people, I’m sure).  But it’s funny – I must have listened to it as a kid and then put it on a shelf.  Of course you need it in your collection, but c’mon, how often do you actually listen to Peter and the Wolf?!   After Peter and the Wolf, I got to know lots of other music by Prokofiev.  And then, a couple years ago, I played Peter and the Wolf in a symphony orchestra.  I think many of us had the sense going into it that it would be easy, a trifle, but we were often wrong.  As it turns out, there’s quite a bit of substance there, even if it feels like a succession of short, insignificant musical cues.  The writing is very clever and the pacing is flawless.  Prokofiev’s voice, which I had come to know from listening to other music by him, comes through clearly, with all of his distinctive idioms represented.  If you want to get to know what Prokofiev sounds like, put on Peter and the Wolf and really listen to it.  And it is all in the service of teaching children (and others) about the instruments of the symphony orchestra.
There are other works which seek to serve as a guide to the orchestra for children, but Prokofiev’s contains so many special touches, and constantly diverts the listener’s attention from the fact that it is, truly, an educational piece, masterful misdirection on Prokofiev’s part.  Like Suzuki’s succession of engaging and delightful musical works, all designed to develop and exercise skills, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is study in disguise, teaching its listeners about the instruments of the orchestra, but entertaining them so thoroughly in the manner of a Russian epic that it is easy not to notice this.  I wonder what kind of teacher Prokofiev was in other areas.  Surely, he couldn’t be that much fun all the time (he is famous for his anger management issue), but I bet he had his moments.  Beneath that gruff, explosive exterior, was a gentle soul full of good humor, and a pocket full of candy for the kids.  Would Prokofiev be happy that Peter and the Wolf is his most famous work today?  I doubt it, but that’s how it turned out – still, there is plenty of authentic Prokofiev in there to represent him quite well.

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Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 4 – Piano Concerto No. 4 by Sergei Prokofiev

This week’s theme is…Wittgenstein Wonders! Can you imagine losing your livelihood?  How about your artistic identity?  The Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein made a very promising public debut in 1913, only to lose his right arm to wounds sustained during combat in the First World War.  Undeterred, he resolved to continue his career as a concert pianist and summarily developed ingenious techniques to play convincingly and virtuosically with just his left hand.  He also collaborated with contemporary composers frequently, commissioning some significant works for piano left hand alone, which I wager you would never suspect simply from listening.  This week we explore works written for and championed by Paul Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 4 – Piano Concerto No. 4 by Sergei Prokofiev

It can hardly be a coincidence that all of the very best composers were also keyboard players, and in many cases virtuosi.  This is true of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Chopin, Saint-Saens, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Shostakovich and Prokofiev.  All of these significant composers were well versed in keyboard technique and, in many cases, world-class virtuosos on their chosen keyboard instruments.  And I am sure there are a handful I am forgetting.  Exceptions to this apparent rule also exist, rare though they are; great composers who did not reach those heights of keyboard performance include: Vivaldi (primarily a violinist, also debatable as to which composer tier to place him), Gluck, Berlioz, and Wagner.  But the first list is longer.  And this isn’t surprising – working at the keyboard forces one’s musical mind to keep track of numerous independent events and parts – keyboard music almost always features multiple simultaneous musical lines, the medium of harmony.  Keyboard instruments are still the best laboratory for understanding the theory of intervals, scales, chords and voice-leading, so naturally composers who spend significant time honing their keyboard skills are able to leverage the resulting harmonic sense in order to deepen their improvisations and composed music.

During the seventeenth century a particular invention increased the appeal of keyboard instruments to composers and their audiences considerably: Bartolomeo Cristofori, an Italian inventor and maker of musical instruments, introduced the first pianos around the year 1700.  The date is difficult to pin down for several reasons: musical instrument development does not occur in a vacuum, and is actually a rather fluid process; the first pianos would have resembled previous instruments like the harpsichord in many ways that would probably surprise modern listeners.  Cristofori’s early prototypes looked little like today’s massive and powerful models, but they are generally regarded as the first step in that direction.

Before Cristofori’s pianos, musicians had two primary options for the creation and performance of keyboard music: the harpsichord and the organ.  Both had their idiomatic and stylistic tendencies – the harpsichord for intimate, salon performances of miniature movements, and the organ for thick, grand, awe-inspiring sacred music in church.  But the piano’s attractive singing quality and powerful projection (which developed over time) opened up new avenues to musicians for creativity and performance.  The gentle and lyrical sound of the piano proved suitable for near endless ensemble configurations and musical roles: the piano can be convincing as a soloist, as an accompanist for a singer or solo instrument, as an equal player in a variety of chamber ensembles, as a percussive color in a symphony orchestra, as a soloist with orchestra, as accompaniment for a choir, and the list (or Liszt?!) goes on.  The piano can croon with intimacy, roar across a concert hall like an aggressive lion, and cover every level in between.  Neither the harpsichord nor the organ, as good as they are for their specific aims, achieve even a fraction of the versatility of the piano.  And for this reason, many composers after Bach (who did not like the first pianos, the old fuddy-duddy!) without hesitation adopted the piano as their expressive performing voice, and it has remained a reliable mainstay for performing composers to this day.

And the piano’s tone, sweet and lyrical, yet powerful, gave rise to what was essentially a new musical genre championed by Mozart, his contemporaries, and his successors: the piano concerto.  Solo concertos had risen to great prominence in the hands of composers like Vivaldi whose numerous and masterful examples for violin and orchestra (for more about that, see this post) inaugurated a stylish vogue throughout Europe.  Modeled on opera arias, concertos allowed the penetrating, focused sound of a melodic instrument like the violin to sing through a thick ensemble.  During the Baroque era concertos tended to feature single line instruments.  There were keyboard concertos, but they tended to be a bit awkward due to the harpsichord’s inability to cut through the ensemble as other solo instruments could.  The harpsichord sounds very clear and present up close, but its powers of projection fade quickly as one moves away.  Handel composed some notable organ concertos as entr’acte entertainment for his later operas and oratorios (see this post and this one) meant to be played upon small chamber organs (not a massive church organ), but this practice did not really catch on among other composers.

But once virtuoso performers and composers like Mozart embraced the piano and began to explore its possibilities, it emerged as an ideal instrument upon which to solo in front of an orchestra.  And so Mozart essentially invented the piano concerto and brought it to its initial maturity with his 27 examples, composed over the course of his lifetime.  These piano concertos allowed him to showcase his orchestral writing, his command of large scale musical forms, and his elegant and imaginative virtuosity, all in one impressive venue.  Later composers used piano concertos for the same function, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it remained a very personal vehicle with which to expose their own virtuosity and artistic interpretations to their audiences.  This is largely confirmed by Beethoven’s production of piano concertos – his 5 wonderful examples all come from the beginning and middle of his career (for more about the different episodes of Beethoven’s career, see this post).  Once he lost his hearing he saw no further need to create piano concertos for himself to perform, so there exist no piano concertos composed during Beethoven’s later years of introspection.

And during the twentieth century, too, virtuoso pianist composers used the piano concerto for the same purposes.  Sergei Prokofiev is a brilliant example.  For him the piano concerto became a very important and effective method for him to introduce his forceful, Bolshevik musical language and razor sharp virtuosity to audiences throughout Russia, Europe and the United States.  Of his five completed piano concertos, composed over the course of two decades, Prokofiev premiered all of them himself, with one exception, and I wonder if that exception remained a sore spot for him, blemishing an otherwise stellar record.

The exception, the one piano concerto he did not premiere himself, and the only one that was never even played during his lifetime, is Concerto Number 4, written for Paul Wittgenstein in 1931.  Shortly after the Great War which cost Wittgenstein his right arm, he became most active in approaching notable composers about writing works for him to perform.  And he performed most of them.  But upon seeing the fruits of at least two of these projects he was reluctant to premiere them out of artistic differences with the musical material.  The first of these incidents was Paul Hindemith’s Klaviermusik of 1924.  You can hear the beginning of that here:

Given Hindemith’s style, certainly not a well-kept secret, I’m not sure what Wittgenstein was expecting, but he claimed inability to ascertain the internal logic of the piece and so never performed it.  In fact, he actually stashed the score away in his study and was content to let the world think it was lost until it was uncovered in his affairs after his widow’s death in 2002.

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 4, composed for Wittgenstein’s Left Hand, suffered a similar fate – Wittgenstein claimed to be unable to discern the internal logic and did not wish to perform it until he did.  That day never came, and so it is the one only of Prokofiev’s piano concertos which did not premiere in his lifetime.  Why don’t you take a shot at it..  How do you find the internal logic?

In spite of this misunderstanding Prokofiev and Wittgenstein remained on good terms, but I wonder if this led to any kind of awkwardness between them.  Prokofiev, perhaps frustrated by this incident, composed his next piano concerto, Number 5, for both of his own hands and premiered it himself, thus stepping back into a long line of virtuoso pianist composers who used the ideal medium of the piano concerto for highly personal expressive aims in presenting their compositional prowess and musical personalities to their audiences.

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