Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Schubert Waltzes

Schubert’s waltzes - or German dances or Ländler - have long been a source of fascination for other composers. Schumann was inspired by them, Brahms edited two collections of them, Liszt transcribed nine of them in his Soirées de Vienne, Webern arranged six of them for orchestra. Prokofiev wasn’t quite so enthusiastic about Schubert as some of the others: Rimsky-Korsakov’s routine of setting his pupils the task of orchestrating Schubert’s four-hand marches did not dispose Prokofiev in the Viennese composer’s favour. The idea of compiling a suite of Schubert waltzes came from Stravinsky, who thought that it would make a suitable item for recital programmes on Prokofiev’s tour of America in 1920. “I selected the most interesting and combined them in a suite, leaving Schubert’s textures virtually unchanged,” Prokofiev declared - without explaining why he didn’t choose one of Schubert’s own sequences of dances.

The two-piano version of the Schubert waltz suite is more interesting. It was written for Boris Romanov’s ballet company, the Romantic Theatre, which had commissioned the score of Trapeze from Prokofiev in 1924 and which needed a kind of appendix to it. The choreography called for the pianos to stand on stage as part of the scenery. “In the original version for one piano I had retained Schubert’s scoring but the large number of waltzes joined together sounded monotonous,” Prokofiev now confessed. “So in arranging them for two pianos, I tried to liven up the music with harmonic and contrapuntal additions.” Schubert admirers will not fail to notice the difference.