Sarcasms, Op.17

Tempestoso

Allegro rubato

Allegro precipitato

Smanioso

Precipitosissimo

Irony had long been a valuable device in composition but it took a young radical like Prokofiev in his early twenties - a musical revolutionary, if not a political revolutionary, in the last years of Tsarist rule in Russia - to elevate sarcasm to the status of creative inspiration. Sarcasm is meant to hurt and Prokofiev’s Sarcasms are as violent as his own recent Toccata or Bartók’s Allegro barbaro or any other of the most progressive piano works written just before the First World War. By promoting sarcasm in this way, however, Prokofiev was not reducing music to the lowest form of wit. “It sometimes happens,” he said, “that we laugh cruelly at somebody or something but when we look at it more closely we see how pitiable and unhappy is the thing we have been laughing at. Then we begin to feel ill at ease. Our laughter echoes in our ears but now it is ourselves that we are laughing at.”

Although that remark was made in specific reference to the last of the five pieces, it is not impossible to find at least traces of a more sympathetic attitude in most of the others. The opening Tempestoso tries more than once to introduce a lyrical element into material dominated by heavily articulated rhythms at the bottom end of the keyboard, by harsh dissonances and extreme dynamic contrasts. The rising melody in the right hand fails to establish itself because it contradicts the prevailing, emphatically registered metre of the piece. The Allegro rubato begins almost playfully, poking harmless fun at Debussy’s recently published Préludes perhaps but then applying full-scale, grotesquely aggressive sarcasm that provokes retaliatory anger in the previously gentle arabesques. The beginning of the Allegro precipitato third piece, with its insistent rumbling rhythms and the conflicting harmonies between the left and right hands (in B flat minor and F sharp minor respectively), seems to offer little prospect of a conciliatory gesture. The slower and expressively lyrical middle section is all the more effective for being so unexpected.

There is no corresponding change of atmosphere in the Smanioso (mad) fourth piece. The shrill raving of the opening section is replaced by low and dissonant grumbling in the middle but the mood is no more conciliatory and the quiet ending, which briefly recalls both kinds of material, represents not so much a change of heart as the same thing at a distance. The final Precipitosissimo (most precipitately) opens in cruelly derisory, unremittingly percussive laughter. After a slower middle section, which so effectively examines the insecurity and the pathos of the victim, the laughter turns inwards in lugubriously dark colours at the lower end of the keyboard.