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JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897) Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G Minor
Johannes Brahms’s 21 Hungarian Dances are among his most popular piano works, and were also transcribed for orchestra by Brahms and others. He first heard Hungarian music as a young man in Hamburg when Hungarian refu- gees passed through the port city on their way to America, and their off-kilter rhythms and flamboyant melodies made a great impression on him.
The Hungarian Dance No. 1 was originally written for pi- ano four hands, and was arranged and published in a piano solo version in 1872. On December 2, 1889, an assistant to Thomas Edison visited Brahms and recorded him playing an excerpt from the dance onto a wax cylinder. The primitive recording is barely audible, but is the only record of Brahms playing his own music.
SERGE PROKOFIEV (1891–1953) Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83
Serge Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata is the middle entry of his three so-called war sonatas. The earliest ideas for the sonata date to 1939 and Prokofiev completed the piece in 1942. It was written at the height of the Second World War, when its outcome was far from certain, but it was premiered in Moscow by Sviatoslav Richter on January 18, 1943, just as the Russian Army came within reach of victory at the Battle of Stalingrad.
It is a ferocious piece: one of Prokofiev’s harshest and most dissonant, untempered by whimsy or subversive wit. It is also one of his most visceral and straightforward in mean- ing: the piece is exactly what it sounds like.
Richter had just four days to learn and memorize the sonata, which he quickly did while staying in the Moscow flat of Henrich Neuhaus, another pianist. Neuhaus’s wife was sick at home with a fever as Richter practiced. “The piano was in her bedroom,” he recalled. “The poor woman had to submit to the onslaughts of the final movement for three or more hours at an end.” Imagine the sounds of the raucous sonata shaking a Moscow apartment building in midwinter of 1943.
Richter then went to play the sonata for Prokofiev, who had just returned to Moscow from Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, where he had been evacuated to safety. Their meeting began with a mundane frustration:
There was a piano in his room, but it turned out that the pedal was not working, so Prokofiev said, “all right, let’s fix it.” We crawled under the piano and were straightening a piece of metal when we banged our heads together so hard that we both saw stars.
Richter remembered this as the most personable moment he ever shared with Prokofiev, a man he found remote and intimidating. Their interactions were otherwise strictly businesslike, limited to the music on the page.
The sonata was hailed as a triumph at its premiere in Moscow’s Hall of the House of Trade Unions, with Prokofiev in the audience. It won him his first of six Stalin Prizes.
The sonata unfolds in three movements. The first, Allegro inquieto (restless), starts with jagged lines, mostly in just two voices, punctuated by crunching, martial chords. Eventually a lyrical theme intercedes, but is subdued by the first idea. The lyrical theme returns once more, but is again subdued before the movement ends.
The second, Andante caloroso (warmly), offers a reassuring alto melody, shadowed warmly in the bass. The middle section grows with active lines and incessant, bell-like
192 The Music at Tippet Rise