Though this was the first symphony Prokofiev published, he had already completed two others, one in G major written for his teacher Gliere when he was just 11, another in E minor dating from 1908 when he was studying at conservatory in St Petersburg. By 1916 he was gaining a reputation as something of a tearaway futurist in other forms, especially with his Scythian Suite, ‘Ala and Lolly’; but already at conservatory he had learned to love and admire the works of Haydn and Mozart, and when he resolved to wean himself from his habit of composing at the piano he conceived the idea of doing so by writing something in a much simpler harmonic language. Instead of developing works he had on the stocks at the time such as his first violin concerto, the third and fourth piano sonatas and the Visions Fugitives, he went off for a complete change on a solitary country holiday in the summer of 1917 to a cottage where there was no piano, and wrote this symphony imagining (he said) what Haydn might have composed had he lived on into the 20th century. It was not an exercise in pastiche, but rather neoclassicism, such as Stravinsky, Hindemith and others were to cultivate some years later. But neither was it entirely pioneering in this respect, for a clear antecedent is Grieg's Holberg Suite. Its name was chosen, he said, “partly out of mischief, and in the secret hope that in the end I would be the winner if the symphony really did prove to be a classic.” His hope was of course fulfilled: the Classical Symphony was his first work to make an international success. He conducted its first performance in April 1918 in Petrograd, and the following month left for the USA, supposedly for just a few months, but in the end he moved from there to Paris in 1922 and did not see Russia again until 1927.

sources

A  Autograph score (1916–17), Stichvorlage for E, in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; a few details are Vers.I, e.g. I 206 Clars n.6 (sounding!) a2

E  First edition score, published in 1925 by Édition Russe de Musique

J  Putative corrected copy of E, which would have served both as Vorlage for P (below), and for the handwritten alterations made in ink by Astrov4 into several copies of E owned by the publisher

K  Copy of E containing Astrov's corrections in ink, examined (c.1991) in the hire library of Boosey & Hawkes