DiCastri, Hummel, Prokofiev (Symphony 7)

Zosha DiCastri | Lineage
J.N. Hummel | Grand Concerto for Bassoon
Sergei Prokofiev | Symphony no.7

In Lineage, I was interested in exploring the idea of what is passed down. As a kid, I loved listening to my grandparents tell stories about “the old country” or of life in the village or on the farm. These tales were at once so real through their repetition, and yet at the same time so foreign and removed from my own personal experience. Thinking of this, I hoped to create a piece in which certain elements are kept constant while others are continually altered, adopted, or added on, creating an ever-evolving narrative.

The resulting music is a combination of change and consistency, a re-imagining of places and traditions I’ve known only second-hand, the sound of a fictitious culture one dreams up to keep the memories of another generation alive.

- Zosha DiCastri

I was struck, when reading Zosha’s note for Lineage, by the idea of imagining and realizing a tradition you’ve only known “second-hand.” What, actually, is our “past” except the collection of stories we have been told and chosen to hold on to as our own? It also speaks to a deep truth about the orchestra in modern times. I think often about how strange it is that the orchestra, as a cultural institution, continues to exist at all. These sound making objects we hold are not of our time, nor of our place, but somehow both the instruments and the tradition of their working together in this particular consort have made their way to us, here, now, in this place, despite so many other means of sound production being available to us. Who among us received their instrument from a parent to whom it was handed down from a parent who received it from a parent? And yet, here we are. In our practice of playing together as an orchestra, we are constantly and continually reimagining what it means to be participants in and champions of this imagined tradition. In the music we perform, we are telling and retelling the stories of what it means to be musicians and of what it means to be human.

 In the early years of the last century, as better editions of older scores became more widely available for general study, and composers of the day began to reach a crisis of expression around the time of World War I, many composers looked more deeply to their musical inheritance in an attempt to reimagine the tradition of writing for the orchestra. Described as “neo-classical,” composers like Prokofiev (and, perhaps more famously, Stravinsky), plundered the past for “new” ideas about how to organize their sounds so much so that Prokofiev nicknamed his first symphony “The Classical Symphony.” Prokofiev, composing in 1918 in St Petersburg sought out the stories of Haydn, who was composing in the late 1700s in rural Hungary. At a moment when composers were writing pieces for orchestras of well over a hundred players lasting upwards of 90 minutes, Prokofiev’s first symphony could be performed with a group less than half that size in about 18 minutes.

 Until the Second World War, Prokofiev enjoyed significant international success as a composer, conductor, and pianist, performing in London, New York, Chicago and Paris, and he largely lived abroad from 1918 until 1936. In 1948, Prokofiev, along with Shostakovich and Khachaturian, became caught up in the Zhdanov Doctrine, the official statement from the Soviet Central Committee declaring his music “bourgeois,” “hermetic,” and engaging in misuse of dissonance. This denouncement came despite 3 years earlier Prokofiev achieving major populist and political triumphs with his 5th and 6th symphonies, and despite his music having won the Stalin Prize (something like the Pulitzer of post-war Russia) six times throughout the 1940’s. But the times were changing, and the inheritance the Central Committee wanted for their people was not the one Prokofiev and Shostakovich had been busy creating during the war years. After the denouncement, it became increasingly difficult for Prokofiev to find commissions and performances and he fell severely into debt. Around the same time, his wife was arrested, interrogated for nine months, and sentenced to hard labor for attempting to send money to her mother in Spain.

 The Seventh Symphony was Prokofiev’s last complete work for orchestra, finished in 1952, a year before the composer’s death. (Curiously, he died the same day as Stalin.) He needed desperately to win, one more time, a major state prize in order to survive financially, and hoped this would be the work with which to do it. (It did eventually win the Lenin Prize, but posthumously.) Despite its somber beginnings, the Symphony overflows with youthful optimism and music reminiscent of “a simpler time.” The fourth movement kicks off with something like a Russian Pioneers march (the early 20th Century Russian version of the Boy Scouts). The first and fourth movements contain a melody so soaring that for me it conjures very specifically the flight dreams we remember from our youth. The second movement is nothing short of the best waltz Tchaikovsky ever wrote, except of course that Prokofiev wrote it. The slow movement we might understand as a remembering of the somber melody of the first movement: Prokofiev remembering his own memories.

 Structurally, the piece is assembled in as tidy a fashion as would Haydn have done, and even more tidy and classically, perhaps, than Prokofiev’s earlier “Classical” symphony. Even the choice of key is a reference to a story handed down to him from an older generation. C-sharp minor is a clear nod to the late string quartet by Beethoven, which also famously bore the catalog number “opus 131.” And is it a coincidence that quartet begins with one of Beethoven’s most somber melodies and moves fluidly on to some of Beethoven’s most jaunty tunes and delicately nostalgic melodies?

 Prokofiev is indeed working hard to extend his artistic lineage, to keep the musical stories that nourished him alive for another generation. It may have turned out that the seventh symphony was Prokofiev’s swan song, but Prokofiev, even in failing health and financial straits, was not a composer inclined to allow the severity of actual life to rule his imagination.

 In the middle of our program, Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Grand Concerto for Bassoon stands as the only evidence that all of these swirling imagined traditions actually once existed. A student of Haydn and a colleague of Beethoven, Hummel joined Haydn’s orchestra at the Esterhazy Estate and took over as music director following Haydn’s death in 1809. Alas, the golden age of music making at the Esterhazy Estate we have all been told so much about flourished and faded with Haydn. Hummel remained for only a few years before seeking his fortunes as a music director and composer elsewhere in Europe.