Cello Sonata Op. 119

One key for coming to terms with the style of Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) is to appreciate his ability to write wonderfully appealing “mistakes.” That is, he utilizes conventional tonal cues to set up expectations about where an individual melody or chord is going to move. But then, precisely at the moment of resolution, he avoids the anticipated note and lands instead on something bitingly dissonant—hence the sensation that a “wrong note” has been played. This principle may be chalked up to Prokofiev’s modernist aesthetic, and early on it helped him gain recognition as Russia’s enfant terrible. But long after the Revolution, it also became a way to take sidelong glances at the official Soviet creed of realist, diatonic, popular music. No composer could face that authority head-on, but Prokofiev found striking ways to individualize his works amidst a sea of faceless state-sponsored compositions. These chromatic “mistakes” thus function as musical jabs when a knockout punch could not be delivered in a life-and-death fight between a free-thinking composer and the governing regime. The saddest thing about Prokofiev’s situation is that he had gotten out, but returned to the Soviet Union on his own volition.
Born into a Ukranian family of privilege and culture, Sergei Prokofiev’s precocious musical talent earned him a place at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1904-14. These were turbulent years in Russia, of course, and young Sergei soon became the Conservatory’s most unruly student, devoted to the European avant-garde (Debussy, Strauss, and Scriabin were particularly influential). On the last day of 1908 Prokofiev made his dramatic debut as composer-pianist. His reputation blossomed over the next decade, and when war and revolution came to Russia, he emigrated to the West.
Then in 1923, while living in Paris, Prokofiev received the first of several invitations to return home. He deferred for the time being but eventually undertook a three-month concert tour early in 1927. Treated as a celebrity and once again circulating with many of his oldest friends, the temptation to move back home must have been very strong. The decision whether or not to return to Mother Russia—now firmly under Stalin’s rule—appears to have been protracted and painful. In the end Prokofiev naively underestimated the political consequences of his act and settled permanently in Moscow in 1936. His timing could not have been worse.
Under the guise of the Union of Soviet Composers, the central party had recently taken control of all musical activity. Avant-garde tendencies were meticulously expunged and repeat offenders, including Shostakovich, received official notice to reform—or else. At first things went decently for Prokofiev, mainly because Soviet leaders were busy fighting the Second World War. But after 1945 control tightened severely, Prokofiev’s own physical health declined, and the future looked exceedingly grim. On February 10, 1948 the composer was targeted in an official party decree condemning musical works “marked with formalist perversions.” A great deal of his music was banned outright. Prokofiev’s creative voice was crushed. Many pieces written after 1948 (such as the disturbingly conformist Seventh Symphony) show little of his earlier brilliance. In a final sad irony, the composer went to his grave on the same day as Joseph Stalin.
Western critics often remark a simplistic, folk-like quality in Prokofiev’s later music that seems grossly out of step with the politically charged atmosphere in which the pieces were written. But Prokofiev always showed a natural gift for song which, when combined with his particular flair for subtle chromatic alterations, creates his distinctive modernist sound. To me, his music merits study for its uncanny ability to voice the ethereal (or better, surreal) and futurist world Prokofiev inhabited. It’s a sound that can be found in the Second and Third Piano Concertos, some of the symphonies, and the middle piano sonatas, but also—occasionally—in his late C-major Sonata for Cello and Piano (1949).

There are broad similarities between Beethoven’s and Prokofiev’s C-major cello sonatas, especially evident at their beginnings. Despite the century that separates his work from Beethoven, Prokofiev launches his sonata in a similarly poignant vein with an undulating melody for solo cello. The shared key—a warmly resonant C major—guarantees a certain degree of aural resemblance, and the lyric nature of the slow introduction betrays a deep affinity with op. 102. If anything, the Russian’s material is even more tuneful. I hear at least four distinct, memorable melodies within the opening Andante grave. The allure of these melodies pulls us in, while Prokofiev’s wry chromatic shifts work their magic. He has us completely at his mercy, like puppets on a string, because the “wrong-note” strategy creates a musical surface that continually unfolds before us. Eschewing literal repetition, always redefining the terrain with more daring harmonizations, unsure of the next turn—we can hardly turn our eyes and ears from the road before us.
Echoes of classicism are clearly there: for instance, the diatonic second theme in the dominant key, or the nearly complete recapitulation in the tonic key. On the other hand, the level of chromatic activity is thoroughly modern, bordering at times on complete saturation, with all twelve pitches of the Western musical world freely circulating. Consider the coda. Prokofiev presents a variation on the Allegro Moderato B theme heard earlier, but he increases the intensity through rapid arpeggios in the cello. Just as it begins to sound too much like a mechanical exercise, he reverts to a hushed serenity produced by tremolo harmonics in the cello against widely-spaced, bell-like sonorities in the piano.
The second movement starts off with a completely new idea. Prokofiev excelled at composing jocular tunes, and this theme remains one of his best. Evoking the image of Pulcinella, the devious trickster from commedia dell’arte tradition, the piano takes the lead on a chordal, march-like theme while the cello plays a strumming accompaniment. Prokofiev follows the opening material by introducing a foot-stomping folk band right off the steppes of central Russia. The movement’s B section, marked Andante dolce, features broad, sweeping phrases with lush harmonies—the most overtly neo-Romantic episode in the entire sonata. One wonders, of course, whether Prokofiev was capable of genuinely feeling such ardor after his ordeals with the Soviet regime. The return of the comic A material ensures that the middle section’s nostalgia stays neatly framed within the grotesque puppet show which has become the new reality.
If one senses irony in the lush B section of the second movement, that sensation is even stronger at the start of the finale. Prokofiev opens the door on a late-19th-century French salon with a theme—lyrical in the cello, against detached harp-like accompaniment in the piano—straight out of the pages of Fauré or Franck. Quite soon, however, that mood is dispelled. Prokofiev’s penchant for surprising chromatic displacements comes to the fore, as if someone took hold of a Fauré score and began changing notes almost randomly. A new virile march theme helps clear the air of any remaining “Western” tendencies. The bulk of the opening section is devoted to variations on the first movement’s second theme and a brief return to the French song topic. Overall, the final movement is a rondo design, ABACAB plus coda. The B material grows organically out of A and includes some of Prokofiev’s most compelling music, full of contrast and polish. At the middle of the movement stands a simple theme of subdued melancholy made all the more touching by the humor and exhilaration of surrounding passages.
The coda builds to a wonderfully nonsensical ending, full of show and bombast and endless glissandi that lead nowhere. Prokofiev maximizes the madness through trills and massive piano chords. The passage as a whole offers a thinly veiled condemnation of “acceptable” Soviet-style musical rhetoric. Only at the last does he rein in his temper, favoring an approach to the final cadence that comes straight out of J. S. Bach: a pedal bass supporting harmonies that change smoothly by step, one chord to the next. I can’t decide whether this final phrase was written out of genuine respect for the Baroque tradition, or whether it too is simply another sarcastically “conformist” gesture. In either case, given Prokofiev’s profound intelligence and personal hardships, it is natural to speculate about which moments were written to keep him sane and which were written to keep him out of a Siberian prison.

(c) Jason Stell