Sergei Prokofiev

Born: April 23, 1891 in Sontsovka, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire)
Died: March 5, 1953, Moscow

Quintet in G Minor, Op. 39

• Composed: 1924
  
• Premiere: March 6, 1924 in Moscow, Russia
  
• Duration: approx. 21 minutes

After Russian émigré conductor Sergei Koussevitzky had successfully premiered Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 at his Parisian concert of October 18, 1923, the composer thought the time had come for him to end his residency in America (and, briefly, Germany) and settle in the French capital. Given the French proclivity for modernity, Prokofiev thought that Paris was a good place to try a new symphony, his second, which he determined was “to be made of iron and steel.” Koussevitzky commissioned the Symphony No. 2 from him early in 1924, and Prokofiev worked on the score as much as his busy piano performance schedule and the birth of his first child, Sviatoslav, allowed. “In order to earn some money while writing the Symphony,” he recalled, “I accepted a commission [in July 1924] to compose a ballet for a roving dance troupe which wished to present a program of several short pieces accompanied by an ensemble of five instruments. I proposed a quintet consisting of oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and double bass. The simple plot, based on circus life, was titled Trapeze.” The little ballet company was headed by Boris Romanov, a Russian émigré who had studied under Fokine and worked for a time at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg; there Romanov had assisted with the choreography for Prokofiev’s ill-fated 1915 ballet, Ala and Lolly, whose music was diverted into the thunderous Scythian Suite. Romanov toured Trapeze through Germany and Italy during 1925, after which the ballet was forgotten, though Prokofiev reworked the music into a six-movement concert suite for the original instrumentation. The Quintet, Op. 39 was premiered on March 6, 1927 in Moscow, during one of Prokofiev’s visits to his homeland in the years preceding his permanent return there in 1933.

Prokofiev noted that the Second Symphony and the Quintet were among his “most chromatic works,” and cited them as examples of the “modern” strain of his creative personality. “The atmosphere of Paris had something to do with this,” he confessed as explanation for the work’s Dadaesque harmonic impishness. In their biography of the composer, Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson concluded that “the Russian had beaten Les Six [a group of six composers, five French and one Swiss] at their own elegant game in this Quintet. This extremely clever little work is about 90 percent French with a vital 10 percent Prokofiev. It expresses precisely the musical Paris of the 1920s.” 

The quintet opens with an oboe theme infected with an abundance of cock-eyed “wrong” notes, which is trotted out above a simplistic accompaniment of rocking open intervals in the other instruments. The music toddles along for a while, stumbles upon the oboe theme again and then abruptly stops. Two variations follow, though they are concerned as much with the open-interval accompaniment figures as with the oboe’s theme. The original music is brought back intact to close the movement. The Andante is a sort of contrapuntal free-for-all based on the theme growled out by the double bass at the beginning. The movement cannot quite escape its boorish accompaniment, however, and finally gives up any fugal pretense in favor of some slap-dash figurations from the clarinet and violin. Prokofiev took a certain glee in noting that the “impractical rhythms” of the following Allegro (i.e., patterns of eighth notes grouped 3+4+3 in a 5/4 measure) “gave the choreographer a great deal of trouble.” (He provided an alternate, simplified version of this movement in the published score.) The Adagio is less music of theme and harmony than of shifting instrumental colors. The following Allegro is an insouciant march. The closing Andantino juxtaposes two strains of music—a duet for the woodwinds (A) and a lively 6/8 passage shared by the full ensemble (B)—in the simple structural pattern A–B–A–B.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda