Maxim Vengerov, violin
Polina Osetinskaya, piano

From Voice to Violin:
Prokofiev’s Five Melodies
All four works that Maxim Vengerov has chosen for his recital have close connections to the performers for whom they were originally written. Both compositions by Sergei Prokofiev on the program’s first half, however, entail a more complicated relationship between composer and performer, for neither began as music intended to highlight the violin.

The work known as Five Melodies was initially tailored as a set of wordless songs for the Ukrainian Nina Koshetz, a prominent soprano—and larger-than-life character—of the era. (Prokofiev himself had been born in what is now known as Sontsivka in Eastern Ukraine.) The composer and singer first met in St. Petersburg in 1917, and both found themselves several years later together in Chicago. Prokofiev had been attempting to establish himself in the United States after going into voluntary exile from the chaos back in his homeland. In 1919, he received a commission from the Chicago Opera Association to write his satirical opera The Love for Three Oranges. Koshetz created the role of Fata Morgana when the opera premiered, after several postponements, in 1921.

The unfortunate delay would prompt Prokofiev to reset his course and move to Western Europe instead. In the meantime, while touring as a pianist in Los Angeles in early 1920, he completed a set of songs he had promised Koshetz to use as recital pieces. These appeared under the title Five Songs without Words and were dedicated to the soprano. In lieu of texts, Prokofiev wrote lines of vocalese for the singer. (As it happened, Koshetz at first didn’t know what to make of the set.)

Disappointed by Koshetz’s initial response, Prokofiev returned to these miniatures in 1925 while living in Paris and reworked the original into Five Melodies for violin and piano. The impetus for this transformation came from the composer’s encounters with several violinists in his new temporary home: the Hungarian Joseph Szigeti, the Odessa-born Paweł Kochański, and the Russian Cecilia Hansen. Still later, Prokofiev transcribed No. 4 for himself to play as one of the Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 52, and orchestrated No. 2 as a Berceuse Hébraïque.

Prokofiev had consulted with Kochański while writing his Violin Concerto No. 1 in 1915, and he again enlisted the violinist’s suggestions in creating the new version of Five Melodies. The first piece is a flowing barcarolle and leads to the lullaby-like second piece. The longest, No. 3, “has an appealing, remarkable melody,” Koshetz had told the composer, adding that “the harmonies frighten me.” Following the scherzo-ish No. 4, the fifth piece presents a serene melody that yields to a faster animated central section before returning in a transformed state.

Tranquil Neoclassicism amid Wartime Epics
Along with his transcription of Five Melodies for the violin, Prokofiev created a few other chamber works highlighting that instrument, including the Sonata for Two Violins (1932), the so-called Sonata for Solo Violin (1947)—a late work commissioned by the Soviet Committee of Arts Affairs as an educational piece—and a pair of violin sonatas. But only one of the latter was originally conceived as a sonata for violin and piano: the Sonata No. 1 in F minor, a haunting, somber work completed late in Prokofiev’s career, in 1946, after he had finished the Sonata No. 2. The apparent reversal in numbering derives from the fact that the
F minor work was begun in 1938, before Prokofiev embarked on the more frequently performed Sonata in D major.

The Sonata No. 2 originated as a sonata for flute and piano that Prokofiev wrote in 1943 while staying in Central Asia, where he was working on several large-scale projects: the ballet Cinderella, the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible, and the opera War and Peace. During the war years, Prokofiev had been evacuated along with other artists to safety in Alma-Ata (nowadays known as Almaty) in Kazakhstan. “I had long wished to write music for the flute, an instrument which I felt had been undeservedly neglected,” the composer remarked.

Having started as a side project amid the aforementioned epic scores, the Flute Sonata was premiered in December 1943 in Moscow, where Prokofiev had returned in the fall. The flutist Nicolai Kharkovsky was joined by the pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Also present at the performance was David Oistrakh—“one of our best violinists,” as Prokofiev deemed him and for whom he was at work on the long-delayed Violin Sonata in F minor. Oistrakh suggested that he transform the newly completed score into a violin sonata and even shared his ideas about passages that should be changed. The violinist later recalled: “With a pencil, [Prokofiev] marked what he found suitable and made a few corrections. In this way—with a minimum of discussion—the violin version of the Sonata was completed.”

The changes were few and mostly applied to bowing, while the piano part remained unchanged. Oistrakh premiered the result with the pianist Lev Oborin in June 1944 in Moscow. This version of the music, which is referred to as Op. 94a or 94bis, quickly overtook the Op. 94 Flute Sonata in popularity. It remains one of Prokofiev’s best-loved works.

In his autobiography, the composer observed that in writing for the flute, he wanted to create a sonata “in delicate, fluid, classical style.” The D major Sonata shares its key with Prokofiev’s youthful breakthrough, the Symphony No. 1, otherwise known as the Classical. Harlow Robinson, an authority on the composer, writes that the music becomes “more aggressive and biting [in its incarnation as a violin sonata] than the original flute version—and loaded with technical difficulties for the violinist.”

The piece opens with the longest of its four movements, which is built from attractive themes presented in neatly proportioned, transparent sonata form. Oistrakh later recalled the composer directing that the scale-like passages “should sound like a wind whispering over a churchyard.”

During his Soviet period, Prokofiev’s style valorized a lyrical forthrightness that he called a “new simplicity.” This is apparent even in the energetic Scherzo, which includes a lyrical section, while the brief Andante in F major recalls Prokofiev’s admiration of Mozart. The Andante also contains “a striking passage of bluesy rumination,” as the biographer Daniel Jaffé observes, that reminds us of Prokofiev’s admiration for jazz. A boldly vigorous Allegro con brio finale also finds room for the ingratiating, never sentimental lyricism that characterizes the piece.

Franck’s Resounding Wedding Present: The Sonata in A major
Although César Franck was a child prodigy, he might also be seen as an encouragement to late bloomers. It was not until he was well into his fifties that Franck started producing the masterpieces for which he is remembered: in particular, his contributions to the genres of the symphony, string quartet, piano quintet, and violin sonata—one of each. The Violin Sonata in A major dates from 1886, when Franck was 63 years old.

Born in 1822 in Liège (eight years before modern Belgium was established), Franck became a French citizen when he was a teenager. His father pressured him to prepare for a virtuoso piano career by enrolling at the Paris Conservatoire. The young musician was, frankly, too introspective and modest to be comfortable in that role. He found his niche by taking on various organ posts and, eventually, was named organist at Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, where he could build on his reputation as an improviser and composer of organ and sacred music.

Franck’s appointment as organ professor at the Conservatoire in 1872 signaled a new phase of intense creativity. In the wake of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, a desire to promote an authentic French style in instrumental music intensified. Franck’s synthesis of Romantic language with Classical forms made a profound mark on a new generation of French composers.

The Violin Sonata, like the earlier Piano Quintet, bursts with passions that were a bit hard to square with the sober, pious figure that Franck’s reputation as an organist had encouraged. Rumors were spread that the Quintet secretly encoded the composer’s
infatuation with one of his pupils, the highly colorful Irish firebrand and fellow composer Augusta Holmès, which generated scandal (and furnished the backdrop for Ronald Harwood’s historical novel from 1978, Cesar and Augusta).

Franck presented the Violin Sonata as a wedding gift to the so-called “king of the violin,” Eugène Ysaÿe (who had also been born in Liège) and his wife. Ysaÿe and the pianist Marie-Léontine Bordes-Pène hastily rehearsed the new score so that they could play it for the gathered wedding guests in the fall of 1886; but the official public premiere took place at an afternoon concert in December at the Musée Moderne de Peinture in Brussels.

One of Franck’s most devoted followers, Vincent d’Indy, later described the dramatic circumstances of the first public performance. It was almost canceled because no artificial illumination was allowed in the museum, and visibility was quickly reduced as daylight diminished: “The two artists, plunged into gloom…performed the last three movements from memory, with a
fire and a passion the more astounding to the audience in that there was an absence of all externals which could enhance
the performance. Music, wondrous and alone, held sovereign sway in the darkness of night.”

Franck casts the work in four movements, but these are interlinked as two pairs forming a slow–fast pattern. The fantasia-like third movement, for example, has a preludial function with respect to the faster final movement, distantly echoing the older church sonata form of the Baroque era. Yet alongside any archaizing tendencies, Franck devises a tightly integrated narrative based on the cyclical reappearance and transformation of thematic material across the entire work.

The violin plays the sonata’s germinal idea in the opening, barcarolle-like movement, which features subtle dialogue with the piano. White-hot passion bursts forth in the chromatically heaving Allegro. Franck, whose keyboard style reflects his unusually large hands, places extravagant demands on the pianist in this movement in particular.

The “Recitativo-Fantasia,” as Franck styles the third movement, introduces a striking phrase on the violin, full of yearning, that is a possible candidate for the famous “little phrase” Proust describes as haunting the protagonist of Swann’s Way when he hears a fictive sonata by Vinteuil.

The Allegretto poco mosso fourth movement begins as a rondo on a theme decorously presented in canonical exchanges between the instruments. But this music, too, grows impassioned as Franck recalls earlier ideas—including the “little phrase”—and culminates in an exuberant affirmation by the musical partners as they conclude the work—and Franck’s wedding gift.

Ravel’s Magic Act of Virtuosity
The final work on our program represents a particularly intriguing case of being inspired by a characterful performer. Jelly d’Arányi (1893–1966), a transplant from Hungary to London, was a violin virtuoso and grand-niece of Joseph Joachim, the 19th-century celebrity violinist and close friend of Brahms. She practiced spiritualism and even claimed that she could communicate with Robert Schumann through séances—a skill that would play a part in the bizarre history of the rediscovery of Schumann’s
Violin Concerto.

Maurice Ravel encountered d’Arányi in the early 1920s when he heard her interpretation of his Sonata for Violin and Cello.
He wrote Tzigane to showcase d’Arányi’s phenomenal talent, describing the work as “a virtuoso piece in the style of a Hungarian rhapsody.”

Ravel was a perfectionist and worked diligently right up to the premiere in April 1924, for which Henri Gil-Marchex accompanied d’Arányi at the keyboard. A few months afterward, he also created a version for solo violin and orchestra. The title Tzigane is a French term for the Romani people, but the piece manifests French fantasies of an undifferentiated “Eastern European” exoticism that became associated with stereotypes of Hungarian folk music and so-called “Gypsies” (a term regarded by many Roma as a racial slur).

For the premiere, Ravel specified using a now-obsolete keyboard attachment called a luthéal, which had been patented in 1919 and gave the pianist access to an expanded range of tonal effects. One of the luthéal’s stops could mimic the sonority of the Hungarian cimbalom, or hammered dulcimer.

Tzigane combines Ravel’s enthusiasm for the specific character of d’Arányi’s virtuosity with gestures that evoke a spirit of wildly celebratory music-making. Formally, the piece moves from slow music to a fast-paced finish, following the pattern of the csárdás, the folk dance that Liszt immortalized in his Hungarian Rhapsodies. Ravel moreover paid close attention to the “diabolical” virtuosity of Paganini’s Caprices.

For the slow first part, the violinist has the stage alone and plays a kind of incantatory cadenza low on the G string. An actual theme is stated when the piano enters the picture, and the dance progresses through a series of variations. Ravel loads up a gamut of special effects and technical hurdles—from harmonics and multiple stops to left-hand pizzicato—in a way that creates the illusion of a Shiva-limbed musician whose magic never fails to leave audiences breathless.

—Thomas May

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. Along with essays regularly com­missioned by the San Francisco Symphony, the Juilliard School, the Ojai Festival, and other leading institutions, he contributes to the New York Times and Musical America and blogs about the arts at www.memeteria.com.