A love letter to one of Prokofiev’s most unlovable works.

From time to time, like most musos, I get a hankering for particular musical moods, styles, genres or artists. It’s a temporary fixation with certain soundscapes, that’s somewhere between a hunger pang and a brain-itch — that only a few tunes or pieces will scratch. Recently this craving, for whatever reason, turned to finding music that was outstandingly intense. Something that would pump the blood and make me form a righteous fist. So naturally, I explored metal. Heavy, doom, death, extreme, thrash, industrialmetals, and of course, grindcore. Life isn’t all daisy-chains and Sesame Street; sometimes we need art that acquaints us with the horrors and brutality that plague actual life, otherwise we can become all too sheltered and timid before the very real challenges that we face. It’s important that our media consumption does not totally succumb to disneyfication (a term that captures the trend towards saccharine toothlessness across media, epitomised by The Mouse©) and metal is the very antithesis of that trend. It’s not a genre I spend much time with, but once in a blue moon, I want a raw catharsis that only the likes of Gojira or Napalm Death (great names, frankly) can deliver — or so I thought.     

Now, I am far from an expert in the metal world, and I apologise to metalhead friends and readers (who may well help me find the band that really blows me away!), but after an hour or so listening to the most iconic tracks from across the genre, I was impressed, but not as overwhelmingly floored as I expected to be. The playing is virtuosic (especially the drummers) and in the more avant-garde subgenres, the rhythms are just as discombobulating as any abstract art music — the very point is often to disturb and disrupt. Still — I wasn’t feeling the extreme and darkness as much as I’d hoped. Perhaps I’ve melted my brain down with too much music by Nancarrow, Crumb and Xenakis? No, if that were the case, I would have turned to those composers to get my violent fix. Alas, the tonic (or anti-tonic?) came from music about to celebrate its centenary, from a composer soon passing out of any living memory. 

Prokofiev is a composer I’ve never struggled to enjoy; his piano music ranks as some of my favourite work to listen to and play. Despite this, I only recently explored his seven symphonies (bar the “Classical” First, which ironically would make for a very charming sequence in Disney’s Fantasia). Realising this knowledge gap, I used a road trip as a chance to methodically make my way through the six I was far less familiar with. I knew the First, so I started with the Second. And I stopped with the Second. My itch was scratched with a pitchfork. This music bludgeons you — Prokofiev himself said that the Symphony was born of “iron and steel” (observant readers will note that iron and steel are — that’s right — types of metal). This and the First Symphony suggests that Prokofiev had a modernist, scientific streak about him. If the First is an experiment in renewing the wit and verve of Haydn, the Second is an enquiry into a zeitgeist haunted by violent ends (and, we now know, worse violence to come). This is war music. And I believe that that’s the key ingredient to the Second Symphony’s incredible impact on us. 

Prokofiev was in his early 30s when he composed the Second Symphony; a few years before that, he avoided conscription by registering as a student during the First World War. Yet even then, his early studies and career were affected by the Bolshevik Revolution. The trauma of industrial trench warfare literally scarred Europe. The symphony’s premiere took place in Paris in 1925 and was poorly received. A century later, it is still among the least performed of Prokofiev’s large works – an ugly duckling. The audience of 1925 was both baffled and unsettled by the music that they heard. I suppose it’s not that surprising — after all, who amongst us now in 2025 wants to watch movies about pandemics and public curfews? I don’t need art to describe that — I was there, man! 

The structure of the music is modelled on Beethoven’s final piano sonata, and the parallels are pretty clear at first glance: both pieces run for thirty or so minutes, with a shorter, robust first movement, followed by an expansive set of variations. It is in the second movements where their messages diverge. Beethoven’s finale explores a meditative, transcendental atmosphere that seems to achieve total serenity and resolution, as if he knew this would be his last word in the medium, and the conclusion of a greater journey. Prokofiev, conversely, turns his second movement into a series of increasingly grotesque aberrations, on what is ostensibly an innocuous theme. The climax is truly dreadful, in the greatest sense: the entire orchestra in militant unison, at maximum volume, stabbing at the listener. The concert hall becomes a war-machine. I dare you not to entertain even a slight headbang in these moments. Just like a metal concert, this is music that can genuinely damage your hearing! It’s thrilling.

So far, I’ve painted a bleak picture. Am I a masochist for loving this? Probably, but these darker human expressions are by and large the purpose of this music, and Prokofiev is one of the best placed artists in history to capture that. Born in 1891 and dying on the exact same day as Stalin in 1953, he was one of many unfortunate millions whose lives were dominated by the World Wars and the many violent revolts, invasions, and oppressions that come with such times. These tragedies and calamities must be understood, and like Picasso’s Guernica, Prokofiev’s irresistible obscenities enable us to process the darkest times directly, so that we are equipped to confront and resolve these elements in our own time. The Symphony’s abstraction only amplifies its potency — you won’t find any text in the score that tells you to imagine this lamentable, tragic, barbaric state of affairs (whereas metal music is draped in over-the-top symbolism, to the point where the heavy-handed demonic lyrics and costumes become a camp pageantry). Furthermore, art like this presents us with the chance to mature our own sensibilities. The filmmaker Francois Truffaut warns that “There’s no such thing as an anti-war movie”, meaning that, even if the director intends to depict the horrors of war as a warning, the onus is still on the audience to pick up that message and not simply glorify the violence in front of them, thereby normalising it. After recently seeing Ridley Scott’s Gladiator sequel, it dawned on me that I was uncomfortably akin to the baying crowds in the Colosseum, who revelled in the spectacle (that Romans could flood the arena and stage naval battles is awesome, so awesome that it almost obscures the fact that we’re watching them execute prisoners). And Prokofiev’s musical offering comes with that very risk — he conjures a macabre world that tests our suspension of disbelief in the extreme. It’s a challenge that we’re privileged to take on, and we’re richer for it.