I would love to know the source! It's either a fascinating bit of insider information, or a relatively obvious coincidence. (DAH,DAH,DAH,DAAAH isn't exactly uncommon in 6/8 time.)

I heard a Russian pianist once say the end of the 6th sonata was Stalin getting machine gunned.

Braginsky was all of eight years old when both Stalin and Prokofiev died, so there's a bit of a disconnect there. Secondly, it would have to be an amazingly sophisticated radio that played a specific signal upon homing in on a frequency ...

The passage is too obscure and buried in the music for me to buy this argument ... as an opening motif maybe, but not where it is now.

Having said that, Prokofiev was not unknown to allude to things in his music or thumb his nose at the Soviet authorities who did not want him writing "decadent" modern music. And then there are times when you aren't sure if he is alluding to things. Case in point from the same (7th) sonata - in the third movement, there are two places where the right hand is playing an ostinato pattern in (2 + 3 + 2) /8 time and out of nowhere the left hand plays what seems to be the opening four notes of the Star Spangled Banner (with the four notes effectively in a different "key" and rhythm). Given that sonatas 6 through 8 were written during WWII, I have often wondered is this is a real allusion.

Braginsky said it was a timpani playing the rhythm.

Was the period when outside radio broadcasts were barred only for a year or two or was it longer?

I finally figured out what he was talking about. It wasn't some mysterious thing that played upon finding the right frequency at all. It was the old BBC World Service interval signal that they would play between programs. It was supposed to represent the letter "V" in Morse code. Click this link to hear it. Here in the US, I remember the old NBC three-note chime playing G, E, and C that was used in much the same way.

I didn't mean to imply that Braginsky thought it was some mysterious thing, only that he thought the theme I mentioned in Prokofiev's 7th was supposed to be a clue to listeners that this signal was for the BBC radio. Now if you mean to imply that the signal was something that everyone in Russia would have known about before Prokofiev wrote his Sonata, then that would mean that his story was an exaggeration or myth or maybe all that Prokofiev wanted to do was to quote it.

If there's any truth to Braginsky's tale, it must be acknowledged that Prokofiev's effort at schnookering the authorities was that of a sophomoric schoolboy. Now Webern, on the other hand, Webern was a guy who was really playing in the big leagues. Read this from the Associated Press:


Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis

By Heinrich Kincaid

(c) The Associated Press

BERLIN, GERMANY (AP) - Recent admissions by an ex-Nazi official living in Argentina have confirmed what some musicologists have suspected for years: that early twentieth century German composer Anton Webern and his colleagues devised the so-called "serial" technique of music to encrypt messages to Nazi spies living in the United States and Britain.

In what can surely be considered the most brazen instance of Art Imitating Espionage to date, avant garde composers of the Hitler years working in conjunction with designers of the Nazi Enigma code were bamboozling unsuspecting audiences with their atonal thunderings while at the same time passing critical scientific data back and forth between nations.

"This calls into question the entire Second Viennese School of music," announced minimalist composer John Adams from his home in the Adirondack Mountains. "Ever since I first encountered compositions by Arnold Schonberg I wondered what the hell anyone ever heard in it. Now I know."

Gunned down by an American soldier in occupied Berlin, 62 year old Anton Webern's death was until now considered a tragic loss to the musical world. At the time the U.S. Army reported that the killing was "a mistake", and that in stepping onto the street at night to smoke a cigarette Webern was violating a strict curfew rule.

It is now known that Webern was using music to shuttle Werner Heisenberg's discoveries in atomic energy to German spy Klaus Fuchs working on the Manhattan atom bomb project in New Mexico. Due to the secret nature of the project, which was still underway after the invasion of Berlin, Army officials at the time were unable to describe the true reason for Webern's murder.

Hans Scherbius, a Nazi party official who worked with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, admitted at age eighty-seven that the Nazis secretly were behind the twelve-tone technique of composition, which was officially reviled to give it the outlaw status it needed to remain outside of the larger public purview.

"These pieces were nothing more than cipher for encoding messages," he chuckled during an interview on his balcony in Buenos Aires. "It was only because it was 'naughty' and difficult that elite audiences accepted it, even championed it."

Physicist Edward Teller, who kept a 9-foot Steinway piano in his apartment at the Los Alamos laboratory, was the unwitting deliverer of Heisenburg's data to Fuchs, who eagerly attended parties thrown by Teller, an enthusiastic booster of Webern's music.

Arnold Schonberg, the older musician who first devised the serial technique at the request of the Weimar government of Germany, composed in America to deliver bomb data stolen by Fuchs back to the Nazis, who worked feverishly to design their own atomic weapons.

As an example, Scherbius showed Associated Press reporters the score of Webern's Opus 30 "Variations for Orchestra" overlaid with a cardboard template. The notes formed a mathematical grid that deciphered into German a comparison between the neutron release cross-sections of uranium isotopes 235 and 238.

Schonberg responded with a collection of songs for soprano and woodwinds that encrypted the chemical makeup of the polonium-beryllium initiator at the core of the Trinity explosion.

And in Japan, Toru Takemitsu took time out from his own neo-romanticism to transmit data via music of his nation's progress with the atom.

"The most curious thing about it," says composer Philip Glass in New York City, "is that musicians continued to write twelve-tone music after the war, even though they had no idea why it was really invented. Indeed, there are guys who are churning out serialism to this day."

Unlike the diatonic music, which is based on scales that have been agreed upon by listeners throughout the world for all of history, twelve-tone music treats each note of the chromatic scale with equal importance, and contains a built-in mathematical refusal to form chords that are pleasing by traditional standards. Known also as serialism, the style has never been accepted outside of an elite cadre of musicians, who believe it is the only fresh and valid direction for post-Wagnerian classical music to go.

"Even if this is really true," states conductor Pierre Boulez, a composer who continues to utilize serial techniques, "the music has been vindicated by music critics for decades now. I see no reason to suddenly invalidate an art form just because of some funny business at its inception."

Tomasino

Hello everyone, this is Alexander Braginsky. A former student in South Carolina alerted me to this discussion. It took a while to figure out how to join, but here I am, ready to set the story strait.
The wonderful observation was made by the late Israeli pianist Yali Wagman, who I met many years ago. He has passed away since. The four note motive appears first in the left hand preceeding the 2d theme in the 1st mvt. It then begins the 2d theme, transformed,sounding soft and sad. Wagman observed that it sounds like the signal that preceeded BBC World Service broadcasts. At the time, these were the only source of free information about the world events, and BBC, along with all Western broadcasts in Russian language, was jammed. Listening to it was a punishable offence, but everybody was taking the risk anyway. This jamming continued for decades, long after I left USSR in 1972.

The practice by composers of encoding information in their works is very old. Books and articles are written, decoding Bach's secret "messages". These are numerous and fascinating, but we won't go into this now. Of course, Schuman has used notation ti encode names of places and people. Shostakovich uses his name ( D-S-C-H) repeatedly, most prominently in his Quartet #8.

Of course, Prokofiev was not passing any information along to anyone, no more that Bach was conveying the correct spelling of his name. These are private things, intended for the composer more than anyone else. Sometimes it enhances the "story" that the work of music is telling, sometimes it brings composer's persona into it more directly.

The 7th Sonata is one of the three great War Sonatas - 6, 7 and 8. The four - note motif (BBC signal, opening of Beethoven's 5th and V -for victory, in this case- in Morse code)shouts out fortissimo for the 1st time on the last page of Sonata #6 (1st mvt). I have also discovered it in #8 (not having a score with me can't tell the location). It is also discernable in the victorious Finale of #7.

All these observations are meaningful only insofar as they help us with the interpretation of the work of music, otherwise they are just curiousities. In case of Prokofiev Sonatas, they introduce a powerfull element of war realities: looking for the news, longing for victory, and the victory itself. More specifically, this must prevent a pianist from playing the opening of the 2d theme in the 1st mvt of #7 "rubato", i.e. with distorted rhythm.

A quick remarque to some other questions, raised in the following entrees. Richter does not speak of it because he did not notice, just like everybody else until Wagman - and he did not publish it. For anybody at the timeimply that Procofiev refers to BBC broadcast would be to implicate themselves into listening. And the KGB officials who monitored BBC broadcasts, did not listen to Prokofiev's sonatas.

Hope it helps!

Quoting Ruprakt on the Webern spoof I posted above:

“I do hope you're joking... this was long ago discredited. LiebeKlavier's above link does a good job refuting the rumor.”

Of course I was joking. Anyone who isn’t rolling on the floor after the third or fourth paragraph is either gullible, offended by the humor, or doesn't have a sense of humor. It doesn’t need to be refuted. As the writer for “About.com:Urban Legends” acknowledges in LiebeKlavier’s post: “…it was never really intended to fool anyone – it’s not that kind of hoax.”

If there's any truth to Braginsky's tale, it must be acknowledged that Prokofiev's effort at schnookering the authorities was that of a sophomoric schoolboy. Now Webern, on the other hand, Webern was a guy who was really playing in the big leagues. Read this from the Associated Press:


Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis

By Heinrich Kincaid

(c) The Associated Press

BERLIN, GERMANY (AP) - Recent admissions by an ex-Nazi official living in Argentina have confirmed what some musicologists have suspected for years: that early twentieth century German composer Anton Webern and his colleagues devised the so-called "serial" technique of music to encrypt messages to Nazi spies living in the United States and Britain.

In what can surely be considered the most brazen instance of Art Imitating Espionage to date, avant garde composers of the Hitler years working in conjunction with designers of the Nazi Enigma code were bamboozling unsuspecting audiences with their atonal thunderings while at the same time passing critical scientific data back and forth between nations.

"This calls into question the entire Second Viennese School of music," announced minimalist composer John Adams from his home in the Adirondack Mountains. "Ever since I first encountered compositions by Arnold Schonberg I wondered what the hell anyone ever heard in it. Now I know."

Gunned down by an American soldier in occupied Berlin, 62 year old Anton Webern's death was until now considered a tragic loss to the musical world. At the time the U.S. Army reported that the killing was "a mistake", and that in stepping onto the street at night to smoke a cigarette Webern was violating a strict curfew rule.

It is now known that Webern was using music to shuttle Werner Heisenberg's discoveries in atomic energy to German spy Klaus Fuchs working on the Manhattan atom bomb project in New Mexico. Due to the secret nature of the project, which was still underway after the invasion of Berlin, Army officials at the time were unable to describe the true reason for Webern's murder.

Hans Scherbius, a Nazi party official who worked with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, admitted at age eighty-seven that the Nazis secretly were behind the twelve-tone technique of composition, which was officially reviled to give it the outlaw status it needed to remain outside of the larger public purview.

"These pieces were nothing more than cipher for encoding messages," he chuckled during an interview on his balcony in Buenos Aires. "It was only because it was 'naughty' and difficult that elite audiences accepted it, even championed it."

Physicist Edward Teller, who kept a 9-foot Steinway piano in his apartment at the Los Alamos laboratory, was the unwitting deliverer of Heisenburg's data to Fuchs, who eagerly attended parties thrown by Teller, an enthusiastic booster of Webern's music.

Arnold Schonberg, the older musician who first devised the serial technique at the request of the Weimar government of Germany, composed in America to deliver bomb data stolen by Fuchs back to the Nazis, who worked feverishly to design their own atomic weapons.

As an example, Scherbius showed Associated Press reporters the score of Webern's Opus 30 "Variations for Orchestra" overlaid with a cardboard template. The notes formed a mathematical grid that deciphered into German a comparison between the neutron release cross-sections of uranium isotopes 235 and 238.

Schonberg responded with a collection of songs for soprano and woodwinds that encrypted the chemical makeup of the polonium-beryllium initiator at the core of the Trinity explosion.

And in Japan, Toru Takemitsu took time out from his own neo-romanticism to transmit data via music of his nation's progress with the atom.

"The most curious thing about it," says composer Philip Glass in New York City, "is that musicians continued to write twelve-tone music after the war, even though they had no idea why it was really invented. Indeed, there are guys who are churning out serialism to this day."

Unlike the diatonic music, which is based on scales that have been agreed upon by listeners throughout the world for all of history, twelve-tone music treats each note of the chromatic scale with equal importance, and contains a built-in mathematical refusal to form chords that are pleasing by traditional standards. Known also as serialism, the style has never been accepted outside of an elite cadre of musicians, who believe it is the only fresh and valid direction for post-Wagnerian classical music to go.

"Even if this is really true," states conductor Pierre Boulez, a composer who continues to utilize serial techniques, "the music has been vindicated by music critics for decades now. I see no reason to suddenly invalidate an art form just because of some funny business at its inception."

Tomasino