We knew we were going to be s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d in our definition of “music” before we even got there, but the programme’s first 12 minutes was just awful. Our ears hurt. A Kiwi composer, now resident in Edinburgh, had come up with something for the trumpet player and orchestra. While not wishing to discount the trumpet player’s skill, all we could see was the naked emperor, the one whose new clothes had been made of nothing. Call that music? Not for us.

Apparently Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) had half his audience respond much the same way when he sat down at the piano and gave vent to his anger and grief through his second piano concerto back in August 1913. His startled audience found it all far too modern - schizophrenic, unbalanced, enraged, terrifying. The score was later destroyed in the upheaval of the Bolshevik revolution, used as fuel for a cooking stove. But Prokofiev re-composed the concerto and peformed the new version, no less dramatic albeit a little less alarming than the original, in Paris in 1924. Prokofiev's friend Vyacheslav Karatïgin described its première as “leaving [us] frozen with fright, hair standing on end.”

But that was 83 years ago now, and we have had a little time to get used to it. Known to be a staggeringly difficult piano piece to play, and probably the most challenging anyone has ever written, 29-year-old Freddy Kempf managed it brilliantly. The applause was tremendous. Standing apart in its almost entirely pervasive, red-eyed rage, Prokofiev’s second piano concerto incorporates not just grief over, but also anger at the wasteful loss of his great friend, Maximilian Schmidthof. And knowing something about Max helped us to appreciate the raw unbridled passion and cut some slack for the composer as well. I can even say that I liked it.

So, what happened to Max? Max was a fellow student from the St Petersburg Conservatoire and talented, highly intelligent, and equally keen to shock colleagues and tutors. But in April 1913 Prokofiev received a letter from Max, and it said: “I’m writing to tell you the latest news - I have shot myself. Don’t get too upset … the reasons are unimportant. Farewell. Max.”

Oh boy! What a terrible letter to get! And so the second piano concerto is full of the horrendous raw emotion of terrible grief and rage, attempts to comes to terms with, then further relapse into more of the same. To suffer the loss through suicide of someone close, this composition says it all.

The content of Judah’s Journal is copyright.
If you are NOT reading this on Judah’s Journal, then it has been
copied from there and is re-published illegally - in other words, stolen.

Suicide… such a bad-tempered response. Some will say that it must take courage, others that it takes terrible despair, but what it really comes down to is murder. One murders oneself. It takes all the worst of suffering and throws it straight at those closest around. No, I have not lost anyone close through suicide, but two friends, a colleague, another I knew of, and the 9-year-old child next door all wasted their lives in that way. The child’s death was the worst and left a burden of guilt, both rational and largely irrational, throughout the neighbourhood. It is such a hard thing to reconcile.

A Friend’s Suicide
(I believe he was wrong to do it)

When my position has me here
The stretch is far to over where
The other side does beckon too
Compassion’s ask is also due

I must not judge a friend’s despair
His motives question when unclear
Being human can be tough
Especially when it cuts up rough

Please forgive my limitations
I’m not the One behind creation’s
Plans, designs, or greater view
A friend I am but human too

© Judah (June, 2003)
Judah’s Journal

So when it comes to Prokofiev, I did understand a little of where he was coming from, and his composition makes great sense when one knows about Max. I was not alive 83 years ago to react as the audience did then, but can say that today’s modernism does nothing much for me… except to hurt my ears and produce visions of naked emperors!