Five Melodies Op.35 bis (1920)

The Five Melodies were originally Five Songs without Words, written in California in 1920 for the Ukranian soprano Nina Kochitz (who was to create the role of Fata Morgana in the first performance of The Love of Three Oranges in Chicago a year later). They were arranged for violin and piano in 1925 on the suggestion of Paul Kochanski, then violin professor at the Juilliard School of Music, who also advised him on the transcription. Although they would surely have displayed more of the satirical side of Prokofiev’s personality if they had been written for violin in the first place, the arrangements are so convincing, and technically so resourceful, that it is difficult to believe that these lyrical if somewhat melancholy pieces could have been conceived in any other form.

It is so beautifully scored for violin that it is difficult to believe that it was conceived for anything else, least of all the voice. In fact, the piece presented here under the fanciful title of Winter Fairy is one of a set of five Songs Without Words Op.35 written originally for voice and piano in 1920 and arranged for violin and piano five years later. While the chromatic undulations that stand for the main theme are obviously well within a singer’s capabilities, the exotic colouring of the violin part - the harmonics, the high-lying and finely decorated melodic line, the double-stopped tremolandos, the attenuated ending - is so natural to the instrument and so alien to the voice that the arrangement amounts to a new composition. There is another manifestation of the Winter Fairy, incidentally, in Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella.

The Five Melodies were originally Five Songs without Words, written in California in 1920 for the Ukranian soprano Nina Kochitz, who had recently arrived in the United States. “In America,” Prokofiev wrote to a mutual friend, “she vacillates between great success and misfortune, eternally penniless, full of indignation and generally choking on the sea of temperament.” Clearly a natural for the part, she created the role of Fata Morgana in the first performance of The Love of Three Oranges in Chicago in 1921.

The Five Songs without Words were not a great success when first performed by Kochitz with the composer at the piano in New York in 1921. They are rarely heard as vocalises even now – which, since they are so melodious and yet free of any language problem, is rather surprising.    They have had more luck in instrumental transcriptions, above all in the arrangement made by Prokofiev himself, at the suggestion of Paul Kochansky, for violin and piano in 1925. With Kochansky’s help, he scored the five pieces so resourcefully that it is difficult to believe that they could have been conceived in any other form. Naturally, bearing in mind their origin, the basic texture of the pieces is a solo line with piano accompaniment. But the colouring applied to the line in this version – the double stopped harmonies that intensify the passion of the central climax of the opening Andante, the folk-fiddle sounds in the middle of the Lento ma non troppo, the harmonics that innocently offset the more dramatic material of the Animato, the evanescant ending of the little Allegretto scherzo, the exuberant virtuosity of the middle section of the final Andante non troppo – is always unquestionably idiomatic.