Violin Concerto No. 2

Composition and Premiere

Commissioned for French violinist Robert Soetens and composed in summer 1935 in Paris, Veronezh, Russia, and Baku, Azerbaijan. It was premiered on December 1, 1935, by Soetens with Enrique Fernández Arbós conducting in Madrid. First BSO/Tanglewood performances: December 17, 1937 (American premiere), Jascha Heifetz, soloist, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting. The first Tanglewood performance took place July 21, 1955, with soloist Paul Gurevich and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra led by Kenneth Schermerhorn. The first BSO performance at Tanglewood was August 5, 1961, with BSO concertmaster Joseph Silverstein as soloist and Charles Munch conducting.  

When Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky died suddenly of cholera in St. Petersburg in 1893, at the height of his fame and just days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony (the Pathétique), Sergei Prokofiev was two years old and living in a remote village in Ukraine. Only a few years later, when the precocious Prokofiev began the serious study of music, Tchaikovsky became an important inspiration and model. One of Prokofiev’s first teachers played four-hand piano arrangements of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies with his pupil. Another early mentor, the composer Sergei Taneyev, had studied with Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory and viewed him with awe and reverence. In 1900, on his first trip to Moscow, Prokofiev saw Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty, and by 1905, just one year after enrolling at St. Petersburg Conservatory, he listed Tchaikovsky as his favorite composer. 

But Prokofiev’s attitude toward the music of his celebrated predecessor changed over the years, reflecting the twists and turns of his complex aesthetic evolution. In the years just before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, as Prokofiev increasingly established himself as the idol-smashing “bad boy of Russian music,” he came to adopt the prevailing Futurist view of Tchaikovsky as old-fashioned, overly sentimental, and passé. Especially in his early ballets (Scythian Suite, The Buffoon, Le Pas d’acier) and operas (Love for Three Oranges, The Gambler, The Fiery Angel), Prokofiev violently rejected the values of classical decorum, refinement, and nostalgia in favor of sarcasm, parody, dissonance, psychological extremism, and caricature. 

By the early 1930s Prokofiev had mellowed somewhat, and as he moved towards what he called a “New Simplicity,” he drew closer again to a Tchaikovskian stance, embracing a more homophonic, transparent, and emotionally lyrical style; more sparing use of dissonance; an increased emphasis on melody; a preference for programmatic and “public” genres; an avoidance of the avant-garde extremism of the 1920s, and an emulation of the ideals, subject matter, and techniques of the leading “classical” composers. To a surprising degree, Prokofiev’s professed vision of a “new simplicity” also coincided with the tenets of Soviet Socialist Realism in music. 

Tchaikovsky’s spirit hovers over several of Prokofiev’s major works of the mid-1930s. These include the Violin Concerto No. 2, the ballet Romeo and Juliet, the score for a film of Alexander Pushkin’s story The Queen of Spades, and incidental music for a dramatization of Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. In the case of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Pushkin’s Queen of Spades and Eugene Onegin, Prokofiev was clearly following in the large footsteps of Tchaikovsky, who had created very famous earlier musical settings of all three works (in two operas and a “fantasy-overture”). Something Prokofiev had always shared with Tchaikovsky was a love for the work of Pushkin (1799-1837), although Prokofiev believed that Tchaikovsky’s music over-romanticized Pushkin while ignoring essential elements of irony and parody. 

In the wonderfully balanced score of his Second Violin Concerto, Prokofiev leavens his characteristically sarcastic wit with a radiant lyricism. The composer was right to observe that the Second Violin Concerto is “completely different” from the equally brilliant First Violin Concerto written nearly twenty years earlier. The First Concerto has faster tempi than the Second, and puts greater emphasis on velocity and flashy technical dexterity in the solo part. The Second Concerto even eschews the convention of a solo cadenza. But what is most different about the Second is its predominantly cantilena character: its melodies are some of the most beautiful, flowing, and lyrical that Prokofiev ever wrote. Nor does he cut them short, impatient with emotional display, as he did in many of his earlier compositions—including, to some extent, the First Violin Concerto. 

The Second Concerto never descends to the sentimental “Glazunov-ism” Prokofiev detested, however. Its characteristically “Prokofievian” rhythmic drive and strategically placed dissonances provide a bracing contrast to the prevailing lyrical mood. Particularly witty and original is the use of percussion—including castanets, triangle, bass drum, and snare drum—in the concluding movement. In combination with the staccato double stops in the solo part, this creates a slightly ironic “Spanish” atmosphere that at the same time pays homage to the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, completed in 1878. 

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.