Sergei Prokofiev

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Lore & Background

Prokofiev began composing his Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16, in 1912 and finished it the next year. That original score was destroyed in a fire following the Russian Revolution. He reconstructed the work in 1923, two years after finishing his Piano Concerto No. 3, and felt it was "so completely rewritten that it might almost be considered [Concerto] No. 4." The orchestration has features that clearly postdate the 1921 concerto. Prokofiev premiered the revised version in Paris on May 8, 1924, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting. The concerto is dedicated to the memory of Maximilian Schmidthof, a friend from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory who committed suicide in April 1913 after writing a farewell letter to Prokofiev. The original premiere had taken place on September 5, 1913 (August 23 on the Russian calendar) at Pavlovsk, with Prokofiev as soloist. That audience reacted intensely: some were positively impressed by the wild temperament, while others shouted "To hell with this futurist music!" and "The cats on the roof make better music!"

Reader's Guide

The Piano Concerto No. 2 is scored for piano solo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, tambourine and strings. It consists of four movements lasting some 29 to 37 minutes. The first and last movements are each around twelve minutes long and contain long, developed cadenzas—the first movement's cadenza alone takes up almost the entire last half of the movement. The first movement opens with a two-bar staccato theme from strings and clarinet, which biographer Daniel Jaffé suggests "sounds almost like a ground bass passacaglia theme, that musical symbol of implacable fate." The piano then introduces a G minor narrante theme that, in the words of Soviet biographer Israel Nestyev, "suggests a quiet, serious tale in the vein of a romantic legend." The recapitulation is carried by a notoriously taxing five-minute cadenza, one of the longer and more difficult in the classical piano repertoire. The scherzo requires the pianist to play almost 1500 semiquavers in each hand at around ten notes a second for two-and-a-half minutes. The intermezzo is a fast-paced, menacing movement that biographer Robert Layton calls "in some ways the most highly characterized of all four movements." The finale opens with a fortissimo tirade and features a "fearful pursuit with an obsessively repeated triplet motif." Prokofiev biographer David Nice noted in 2011, "A decade ago I'd have bet you there were only a dozen pianists in the world who could play Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto properly. Argerich wouldn't touch it, Kissin delayed learning it, and even Prokofiev as virtuoso had got into a terrible mess trying to perform it with Ansermet and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s, when it had gone out of his fingers."

Did You Know?

• The original score of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 was destroyed in a fire following the Russian Revolution.
• Prokofiev reconstructed the concerto in 1923 and declared it 'so completely rewritten that it might almost be considered [Piano Concerto] No. 4.'
• The concerto is dedicated to Maximilian Schmidthof, a friend who committed suicide in April 1913 after writing a farewell letter to Prokofiev.
• At the 1913 premiere, audience members shouted 'To hell with this futurist music!' and 'The cats on the roof make better music!'
• The first movement contains a five-minute cadenza that Prokofiev described as 'one of the hardest places in the concerto.'

The Score That Burned and Was Reborn

In 1912, Prokofiev began composing what would become his Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16, and finished it the following year. That original manuscript, however, perished in a fire that followed the Russian Revolution, leaving the work in a state of limbo for nearly a decade. When Prokofiev finally turned to reconstructing the piece in 1923—two years after completing his Third Concerto—he did not merely restore what had been lost. He substantially reworked the orchestration, introducing features that clearly postdated the 1921 concerto, and described the result as "less foursquare" and "slightly more complex in its contrapuntal fabric." In his own assessment, the revision was so thorough that the piece "might almost be considered [Concerto] No. 4." The surviving score thus carries the fingerprints of two distinct creative moments separated by war, revolution, and exile, making the work a palimpsest of Prokofiev's evolving voice.

Two Premieres, Two Audiences

The concerto first saw the light of day on September 5, 1913—at Pavlovsk, with Prokofiev himself at the piano. The reaction was volcanic and divided. Some listeners were seized by the work's wild temperament, while others recoiled in outrage, shouting things like "To hell with this futurist music!" and "The cats on the roof make better music!" A decade later, on May 8, 1924, Prokofiev brought the reconstructed version to Paris, where Serge Koussevitzky led the orchestra. The performance carried a dedication that gave the evening a deeply personal gravity: the concerto was offered to the memory of Maximilian Schmidthof, a fellow student at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory who had taken his own life in April 1913, after penning a farewell letter addressed to Prokofiev. The gap between the two premieres—separated by revolution, loss, and a decade of revision—meant that the audience in Paris was hearing a fundamentally different instrument from the one that had provoked such fury in a Russian drawing room.

A Work That Resists Its Pianists

Few concertos in the standard repertoire demand so much of their soloist. Prokofiev himself acknowledged that the climactic passage in the first movement—"one of the hardest places in the concerto"—was a particular trial. The movement's recapitulation is essentially carried by a five-minute cadenza, among the longest and most punishing in the classical piano literature, written in two staves with a third requiring the pianist to execute large two-hand jumps throughout. The scherzo presents a different kind of endurance test: both hands sustain stubborn unison semiquavers, roughly fifteen hundred notes apiece, at around ten notes per second with virtually no variation in speed for two and a half minutes. Biographer David Nice observed in 2011 that a decade earlier he would have wagered only a dozen pianists worldwide could perform the concerto properly. Argerich declined to learn it; Kissin put it off; and Prokofiev himself, in the 1930s, had fallen into "a terrible mess" attempting it with Ansermet and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the work having "gone out of his fingers."

A Narrative of Fate and Cataclysm

The concerto's four movements, spanning roughly twenty-nine to thirty-seven minutes, are built around a dramatic arc that Prokofiev's biographers have likened to a tragic legend. The first movement opens with a spare two-bar staccato motif in strings and clarinet—a figure that sounds, in one analyst's reading, like a passacaglia theme embodying implacable fate. The piano then introduces a G minor narrante theme, a quiet and serious tale, alongside a rising scalar idea that later emerges in unison strings as a broad singing melody, an echo of Rachmaninov's influence. A third, more flippant walking theme looks forward to its counterpart in the Third Concerto. The movement's accumulated tension is released in a premature fff colossale climax of oscillating triplet runs across the upper four octaves, followed by a supreme discord where C-sharp minor collides with D minor. The orchestra erupts—horns, trombones, trumpets, and tuba blaring the fate theme fortissimo—before two cymbal crashes seal the cataclysm in G minor. What follows is a hushed, almost spooky return: the piano timidly restates the narrante theme, fading pianissimo into silence.