String Quartet No.1 in B minor Op.50 (1930)

On a concert tour in the United States in 1930 Prokofiev received a request from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge – a generous but, according to Diaghilev, “completely deaf” patron of new music – for a string quartet to add to the manuscript collection of the Library of Congress. Never having written a string quartet before, and having little experience of chamber music in general, he passed his time on the long train journeys between concert venues reading Beethoven’s quartet scores and evidently learning much from them. “That,” he said on the occasion of the first performance of the work at the Library of Congress in 1931, “is the source of the rather ‘classical’ language of the first movement.”

The classical influence is actually less evident – Beethoven, incidentally, would never have written a string quartet in the technically unhelpful key of B minor – than anticipations of the Romeo and Juliet ballet Prokofiev was to write four or five years later. The lively tune heard on violin in the opening bars of the first movement was later used in the street carnival in the second act of the ballet and, although there is a contrastingly lyrical second subject introduced    by viola after a reduction in rhythmic activity, it is the dance element that dominates the material here. A third theme, the closing theme of the exposition in classical terminology, is presented in much the same spirit as the first subject, which latter initiates the development section where it motivates a resourcefully scored contrapuntal episode. The beginning of the recapitulation, approached by the same note repeated no fewer than 28 times on first violin, is still more clearly delineated and, though somewhat abbreviated, faithfully reflects the exposition.

The work was apparently criticised at the time for the allegedly disproportionate presence of two slow movements in a total of three. Certainly, the second movement begins Andante molto, opening with an apparent allusion to the “Muss es sein?” motif of Op.135. But the late-Beethoven atmosphere and the slow tempo survive for scarcely a minute before Prokofiev’s balletic instinct asserts itself in a Vivace scherzo that lasts almost as long as the first movement. Its basic argument is the contrast between a bouncy little rhythmic challenge on viola and cello and the rather more plaintive answer it immediately provokes from first violin in a distant echo of a phrase from the Andante molto introduction. There are two “trios,” the first signalled by a prominent passage of cello pizzicato, both of them featuring an expressive variant of the violin theme on viola.

By common consent, the most inspired movement of the three is the closing Andante – a judgement Prokofiev seems to have shared, since he arranged it for piano in his Six Pieces Op.52 as well as re-scoring it for string orchestra. Beginning with a dialogue between first violin and cello alongside an ostinato for the other two instruments, far from adhering to any classical slow-movement form it generates its own continuity, not least by way of a viola melody that prefigures both the grace and the pathos of a Juliet. A moment of panic not long before the end is met by a last memory of the “Muss es sein?” motif.