content :)
(The earlier blog on Prokofiev's first quartet
was the "This time, with feeling", but lacked a bit in the content department, telling you very little about the piece.)
First, from laziness, a canned recap of the work's history from the notes to the 1994 recording of the work on the
Naxos label (Naxos 8.553136, recommended) by the Aurora String Quartet, here paraphrased closely with a few thoughts added.
In 1930, Prokofiev visited the United States on an extended concert tour that took him through the major cities of the US and included visits to Cuba and Canada as well. One benefit of the extremely successful tour was a commission from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Fund at the Library of Congress to write a string quartet.
Such a commission, Prokofiev later noted, served two purposes for the Library - it allowed them to give the first performance of a work by an important contemporary composer, and it gave them the manuscript for their archives. This first performance took place at the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress on the 25th of April, 1931.
Prokofiev later wrote in his autobiography that before starting work on this first of his two string quartets, "I studied Beethoven's string quartets, chiefly in railway carriages on my way from one concert to another... Perhaps this explains the somewhat 'classical' idiom of the first movement of my quartet." He added that the quartet has "two distinctive features: the finale is the slow movement and, secondly, the key of B minor is just a half tone below the limits of the cello and viola range. This involves a number of difficulties in writing the music." Apparently the finale was written first, and was (later?) transcribed by its composer for solo piano and for string orchestra in which forms it has been recorded.
After hearing the quartet performed in Moscow in October of 1931, Prokofiev's friend Nikolay Myaskovsky wrote to critic Boris Asafyev "The composition is completely free of effects, something quite surprising for Prokofiev... there is true profundity in the sweeping melodic line and intensity of the finale. This movement strikes deep..."
The first movement is a
sonata with three main groups of material. Note that for all the composer's talk of a "classical" idiom, the world of the Classical Symphony is long gone, dissonance is free, different emotions prevail. But the end of the third group is followed by a pause and a clear re-entry of a form of the "rocket" opening of the work (18th-century Mannheim rocket, anyone?) - almost an early-Classical anachronism - before motivic and key development is seriously underway.
The moment of "return home", where the development has built up steam to prepare psychologically for the re-entry of the opening material, is typically for Prokofiev (and Myaskovsky too!) more a quiet build-up of dissonance and pause than, as often with (say!) Beethoven, an acceleration over a pedal-point that lands on the main key and main theme (in his "Waldstein" and "Pathetique" sonatas).
The recapitulation section itself has some interesting and appropriate differences from the section it's "repeating"; the coda after it is very brief and to the point, landing on a solid whump of a B chord.
The middle, scherzo-like movement, is preceded, unusually!, by a slow introduction. This combines some thematic material from the scherzo and from the Andante finale to follow, and has reaches a brief climax. The scherzo itself is again a sonata movement, in C major this time (very far tonally from B on the circle-of-fifths!), and should be listened to carefully both for enjoyment and its own deep surprises.
The
Andante finale opens in E minor with a quiet exchange that ends when the viola's F♯ pulls everyone with it to B minor. This F♯ proves to be the beginning of a melody in several phrases, the main theme of the B minor movement. It is no sooner heard then repeated in G minor, though the last phrase turns to end in B minor again.
Raincheck on the rest though, posting this now :)
