moment that its logic and breath have run out.

Symphony No. 5, Op. 100

Of Prokofieff’s subsequent symphonies it is only the Fifth thus far that has established itself with any promise of endurance in the concert repertory. The First, composed in 1908 and not included in the catalogue of Prokofieff’s works, may be dismissed as a student experiment. The Second, following sixteen years later, proved a stylistic misfit of noisy primitivism and even noisier factory-like mechanism. The Third, an impassioned and dramatic fantasy, dating from 1928, drew on material from an unproduced opera, “The Flaming Angel.” Prokofieff also tells us that the stormy scherzo movement derived in part from Chopin’s B-flat minor Sonata. The symphony was first performed in Paris on May 17, 1929, and carries a dedication to his life-long friend and colleague, the composer Miaskovsky. “I feel that in this symphony I have succeeded in deepening my musical language,” Prokofieff wrote after his return to Russia and when the work had received its initial performances there. “I should not want the Soviet listener to judge me solely by the March from ‘The Love of Three Oranges’ and the Gavotte from the ‘Classical Symphony.’” According to Israel Nestyev, Prokofieff’s Soviet biographer, the Third Symphony was “something of an echo of the past, being made up chiefly of materials relating to 1918 and 1919.”

With the Fourth Symphony we come to what might be termed Prokofieff’s “American” Symphony. This was composed in 1929 for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Boston Symphony. Much of the music harks back to the suave and courtly style of the “Classical” Symphony, without its uniform elegance of idiom, however. It was certainly a change from an explosion like the “Scythian” Suite, that had fairly rocked the sedate and cultivated subscribers of Symphony Hall out of their seats.

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It is the Fifth that constitutes Prokofieff’s most ambitious contribution to symphonic literature. It is a complex and infinitely variegated score, yet its composition took a solitary month. Another month was given over to orchestrating the work, and somewhere in between Prokofieff managed to begin and complete one of his most enduring film scores, that to Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible.” The fact is that Prokofieff had been jotting down themes for this symphony in a special notebook for several years. “I always work that way,” he explained, “and that is probably why I write so fast.”

Composed during the summer of 1944, the Fifth Symphony was performed in America on November 9, 1945, at a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky. Five days later, under the same auspices, it was introduced to New York at Carnegie Hall. Prokofieff had himself directed the world premiere in Moscow in January of that year. At that time Prokofieff, asked about the program or content of the symphony would only admit that it was a symphony “about the spirit of man.” The symphony was composed and performed in Moscow at a time of mounting Soviet victories over the German invaders. It seemed inevitable that a mood of exultation would find its way into this music. To Nestyev the symphony captured the listeners “with its healthy mood of affirmation.” Continuing, this Soviet analyst declared that “in the heroic, manly images of the first movement, in the holiday jubilation of the finale, the listeners sensed a living transmutation of that popular emotional surge ... which we felt in those days of victories over Nazi Germany.”

In four movements, the Fifth Symphony is of basic traditional structure, despite its daring lapses from orthodoxy. The predominant mood is heroic and affirmative, at times tragic in its fervid intensity, sombre recurringly, but essentially an assertion of joyous strength, with momentary bursts of sidelong gaiety reserved for the last movement. A terse and searching analysis of the Fifth Symphony was made by John N. Burk for the program-book of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It reads:

“I. Andante. The opening movement is built on two full-voiced melodic themes, the first in triple, the second in duple beat. Contrast is found in the alternate rhythm as both are fully developed. There is an impressive coda.

“II. Allegro marcato. The second movement has earmarks of the classical scherzo. Under the theme there is a steady reiteration of a staccato accompaniment, 4/4. The melody, passed by the clarinet to the other woodwinds and by them variously treated, plays over the marked and unremitting beat. A bridge passage for a substantial wind choir ushers in (and is to usher out) the Trio-like middle section, which is in 3/4 time and also rhythmically accented, the clarinet first bearing the burden of the melody. The first section, returning, is freshly treated. At the close the rhythm becomes more incisive and intense.

“III. Adagio. 3/4. The slow movement has, like the scherzo, a persistent accompaniment figure. It opens with a melody set forth espressivo by the woodwinds, carried by the strings into their high register. The movement is tragic in mood, rich in episodic melody. It carries the symphony to its deepest point of tragic tension, as descending scales give a weird effect of outcries. But this tension suddenly passes, and the reprise is serene.

“IV. Allegro giocoso. The finale opens Allegro giocoso, and after a brief tranquil passage for the divided cellos and basses, gives its light, rondo-like theme. There is a quasi-gaiety in the development, but, as throughout the symphony, something ominous seems always to lurk around the corner. The awareness of brutal warfare broods over it and comes forth in sharp dissonance—at the end.”

The Sixth Symphony, in E-flat minor, Opus 111

In a letter to his American publishers dated September 6, 1946, Prokofieff announced that he was working on two major compositions—a sonata for violin and piano and a Sixth Symphony. “The symphony will be in three movements,” he wrote. “Two of them were sketched last summer and at present I am working on the third. I am planning to orchestrate the whole symphony in the autumn.”

The various emotional states or moods of the symphony Prokofieff described as follows:—“The first movement is agitated in character, lyrical in places, and austere in others. The second movement, andante, is lighter and more songful. The finale, lighter and major in its character, would be like the finale of my Fifth Symphony but for the austere reminiscences of the first movement.”

How active and productive a worker Prokofieff was may be gathered from other disclosures in the same letter. Besides the Symphony and Sonata, he was applying the finishing touches to a “Symphonic Suite of Waltzes,” drawn from his ballet, “Cinderella”, his opera, “War and Peace” (based on Tolstoy’s historical novel), and his score for the film biography of the Russian poet Lermontov. Earlier that summer he had completed three separate suites from “Cinderella” and a “big new scene” for “War and Peace”. No idler he!

The first performance of Prokofieff’s Sixth Symphony occurred in Moscow on October 10, 1947. Four months later, on February 11, 1948, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued its resolution denouncing Prokofieff and six other Soviet composers for their failure to “permeate themselves with a consciousness of the high demands made of musical creation by the Soviet people.” The seven composers were charged with “formalist distortions and anti-democratic tendencies in music” in