Gavotte from the “Classical” Symphony

“If Haydn had lived into our era,” Prokofiev said, “he would have retained his compositional style but would also have absorbed something from what was new.” It was in an effort to write a piece in the manner of this imaginary Haydn (who would have been 184 by then) that in 1916 Prokofiev started work on what he was to call his “Classical” Symphony. Strangely enough - considering that Haydn included not one gavotte movement in any of his symphonies and would have been less and less likely to do so the longer he lived - Prokofiev started with the Gavotte.

Much the shortest and the most popular of the four movements of the “Classical” Symphony, this 20th-century imitation of the 18th-century Gavotte contrasts cheerfully clumsy outer sections with a quietly graceful middle section. Prokofiev liked it so much that he used it again in the Ball Scene of his Romeo and Juliet ballet nearly twenty years later.