The Quiet Revolution of a B Natural: Prokofiev's ‘New Simplicity’ in the Second Violin Concerto

Abstract

This essay explores changes in Prokofiev's compositional style that occurred in the mid-1930s, around the time that he was making his decision to return to his homeland. In his diary Prokofiev wrote about a desire for a 'new simplicity', a style that featured simple melodies and comprehensible form. Compared to the avant-garde aspirations of his earlier works, his 'new simplicity' features a self-conscious return to Classical precedents. Prokofiev believed his new lyricism would be a uniquely modern yet accessible music for the Soviet people. Many of his most popular works, including Lieutenant Kijé (1933), Romeo and Juliet (1935-6), and Peter and the Wolf (1936), are written in the style associated with this 'new simplicity'. The style is distinctive because of its sudden and markedly trangressive chromatic swerves to distant harmonic areas. By invoking and then thwarting tonal conventions, Prokofiev creates a compelling tension between Classicism and modernism. This essay presents the first movement of his Violin Concerto no. 2 (1935) as an exemplar of his 'new simplicity'. The fractured musical surface is interpreted as a musical narrative, as an ironic satire of sonata form.twentieth-century music 6/2, 183-208

Second‐Order Topics and Prokofiev's String Quartets

“…Such a subversion relies on the topic's conventional association with a formal function. More generally, this undermining of clarity resembles the effect of what some scholars have described as Prokofiev's 'wrong note' harmony, now in the semantic dimension (Bass 1988, Minturn 1997and Rifkin 2000. Although 'wrong' is unhelpfully pejorative, the term indicates an incongruity relative to the prevailing conventions or, as Neil Minturn writes, 'some context is sufficiently clear and well defined to present some notes or gestures as "wrong"' (Minturn 1997, p. 5).…”

“…Others have framed elements of Prokofiev's music in such terms, focusing on the manipulation of inherited forms to create an ironic effect (e.g. Rifkin 2009 and Perry 2020; see also Shapovalov 2004). Although I am focusing on the second‐order treatment of topics, which, in Barthes's model, does not necessary connote irony, the references are similarly defamiliarised through the omission of key elements: sufficient characteristics are present such that the topic is understood as the reference point, yet elements are distorted to interpret it as manipulated, suggesting a double voicing that is central to irony (Sheinberg 2000 and Frymoyer 2017).…”

“…Either way, the reference to Beethoven, a ‘classical’ idiom and indeed the string quartet genre itself point to a consciously Classical soundworld. Prokofiev's own concept of ‘New Simplicity’ in his music of the 1930s adds further context: Deborah Rifkin characterises New Simplicity as exemplifying ‘a uniquely modern yet accessible music for the Soviet people’ (Rifkin 2009, p. 183; see also Harley 2020), where harking back to Classical idioms might be essential for ‘accessibility’ (I shall return below to these principles as central tenets of socialist realism).…”