Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 was composed in 1916–17, and premiered the following year, just before the composer left his politically explosive homeland for an extended residence in the US and Western Europe.
The symphony would earn an enduring spot in the orchestral repertoire as a masterpiece, and in the history books as a forebear of the widespread neoclassicism of the 1920s.
Prokofiev later explained that his intent in the Classical Symphony was “to translate musical classicism into a specifically 20th- century idiom:
It seemed to me that if Haydn had lived into this era, he would have kept his own style while absorbing things from what was new in music. That’s the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the Classical style.“
Here is the music:
