Violin Concerto No. 1 in D, Opus 19  

Composition and premiere: Prokofiev began his Violin Concerto No. 1 in 1915, set it aside, and completed it in St. Petersburg in summer 1917. He took the piece with him when he left Russia in 1918 to try his fortune in the U.S. and Europe, and the first performance took place October 18, 1923, in Paris, at Serge Koussevitzky’s Concerts Koussevitzky with Marcel Darrieux as soloist. First BSO performances: April 1925 (American premiere), Koussevitzky conducting, BSO concertmaster Richard Burgin, solo violin. First Tanglewood performance: July 31, 1948, Koussevitzky conducting and Isaac Stern, soloist. 

Sergei Prokofiev’s long friendship and collaboration with Serge Koussevitzky (1874-1951), whose 150th anniversary we celebrate this summer at Tanglewood, was one of the most important creative relationships of the composer’s career. They first met in Moscow in 1913, and over the following 35 years Koussevitzky promoted Prokofiev’s music in Russia, France, and the United States as publisher, conductor, impresario, and mentor. No other single person—with the possible exception of ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev—did more than Koussevitzky to familiarize audiences with Prokofiev’s work. Seventeen years Prokofiev’s senior, Koussevitzky acted as father figure and artistic advisor to the often willful and famously “touchy” composer.  

Koussevitzky played an especially important role in introducing Prokofiev’s music to audiences in Paris in the 1920s, and later in Boston as conductor of the BSO (1924-1949). Prokofiev described Koussevitzky’s influence in a 1924 letter to his friend Nikolai Miaskovsky. “It’s no secret to anyone that it’s impossible to rely on Koussevitzky’s taste, but neither can one deny that he knows which way the wind is blowing. He demonstrated that ability in Russia, and now, in Paris, he is excellently informed about what is going on in music. His opinions reflect the taste of a rather important circle of people.” 

Koussevitzky and his wife Natalia had gravitated to Paris soon after leaving Russia in 1920. In the French capital, at the time the center of new music, he became a grand seigneur of culture with his fashionable Concerts Symphoniques Koussevitzky, inaugurated in 1921. He conducted numerous world premieres of works by leading composers of the day, including Honegger, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev. The highlight of the third season was a concert on October 18, 1923, featuring the first performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1. 

Prokofiev had begun work on what he originally envisioned as a violin concertino in 1915, but put it aside to concentrate on his opera The Gambler. When he returned to it in late 1916, he decided to expand the concertino into a full concerto, but preserving the concertino’s serene opening theme. In February 1917, just days before the February Revolution that led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the end of Romanov rule in Russia, Prokofiev wrote in his diary that he was “sketching out the scherzo (which I plan to make the scherzo of all scherzos) from previously conceived fragments, and a few phrases of the finale.” In May, while composing the Symphony No. 1 (Classical) he planned the orchestration, which he completed while taking a river trip along the Volga and Kama rivers, thousands of miles east of Moscow, traveling far from the mouth of the Kama into distant tributaries near the Ural Mountains. To Miaskovsky, Prokofiev wrote that “The Kama is wild, virginally pure, and incredibly beautiful here, with its red hilly shore covered with dark Siberian pine forest. I’m orchestrating my violin concerto and am planning to finish my symphony.” 

Both of these concise neoclassical works seem to reflect the clarity and tranquility of the Siberian landscape. This is seemingly effortless and remarkably direct music, transparent and light, free of literary, visual, or ideological baggage. The concerto’s predominantly lyrical and romantic mood is unusual for Prokofiev, already associated with the dissonant and aggressive style of his early piano pieces, such as Suggestion Diabolique or noisy orchestral works like the Scythian Suite and the cantata Seven, They Are Seven. Marked sognando (dreamily) and pianissimo, the first movement opens with one of Prokofiev’s most inspired themes, soaring and swaying upward in the solo violin part, against gently shimmering tremolo in the violas. Throughout the movement, the spare orchestral accompaniment, mostly in the woodwinds and harp, never overwhelms the soloist. A playful contrasting second theme marked narrante (like telling a story) provides ample opportunity for virtuosity. Prokofiev told violinist David Oistrakh that he should play this theme “as though you’re trying to convince someone of something.” 

Structured as a five-part rondo in E minor, the second movement rushes by at headlong vivacissimo speed, tumbling and whirling through sparkling pizzicato passages in a bumptious accelerating march that showcases the “devilish” and “motoric” Prokofiev. It provides a fine balance of mischievous sourness between the quieter, longer, and sweeter outer movements. In the finale, the bassoon announces the main song-like theme, taken up by the violin, singing, in the fulsome words of Prokofiev’s official Soviet biographer Israel Nestyev “in a full voice of the beautiful and lofty feelings of man.” The movement gradually accelerates, the brass and percussion finally joining in after remaining silent for most of the concerto. A long coda builds to an enchanting peaceful conclusion with the ecstatic return of the first movement’s main theme, a fluttering duet between violin soloist and flute. Koussevitzky told violinist Isaac Stern that this section “must sound fantastical!” 

On technical details, Prokofiev had consulted Polish violinist Paul Kochanski, who was scheduled to give the premiere in Petrograd in November 1917. Unfortunately, the turmoil of the Bolshevik Revolution got in the way. Only a few months later, Prokofiev left war-torn Russia, traveling to the United States. Later he would move to Paris, where the concerto was finally performed on October 18, 1923, by Koussevitzky’s Paris concertmaster Marcel Darrieux. Held in the grand setting of the Opera, the concert attracted numerous luminaries of the Parisian cultural elite, including Picasso, dancer Anna Pavlova, Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, and violinist Joseph Szigeti, who later popularized the concerto around Europe and America. 

But the Paris critics (including Nadia Boulanger) were less enthusiastic about the concerto than about Prokofiev’s earlier more “savage” works, like the Scythian Suite and the ballet The Buffoon. Lyricism was out of style at the time. The tastemakers preferred another work on the same program: the Octet for wind instruments by Igor Stravinsky, in whose shadow Prokofiev was fated to live in Paris. Moscow felt differently, however: only three days after the Paris premiere, the concerto was performed there in a violin-piano version by two brilliant emerging musicians, violinist Nathan Milstein and pianist Vladimir Horowitz. With time, tastes changed, and the concerto has become one of the most beloved works in the repertoire of leading violinists, including Midori. 

HARLOW ROBINSON 

Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.