The Los Angeles Philharmonic has released a new album that captures the wonder and excitement of Sergei Prokofiev‘s “Peter and the Wolf.” The recording comes from a 2021 performance featuring music and artistic director Gustavo Dudamel conducting with EGOT-winning actress Viola Davis narrating, making it a high-profile, Hollywood-adjacent rendition of the symphonic fairy tale.
Even ninety years after its composition, “Peter and the Wolf” remains a quintessential “gateway” orchestral piece for kids and adults alike.
The History of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”
Sergei Prokofiev was a Russian composer born in 1891, but spent many years outside of his homeland. When he returned in the mid-1930s, it was to the Soviet Union. As Orrin Howard’s program notes from the Hollywood Bowl explain, it was then that “he composed many of his most popular works, including Peter and the Wolf in 1936.”
In 1935, Prokofiev took his children to some events at the Moscow Children’s Musical Theater. The director commissioned him to write something for the theater, and he accepted. His goal was to write something to introduce kids to the instruments of the orchestra, and he came up with a clever plan.
“Every character in the story had its own motif played each time by the same instrument,” Prokofiev wrote in his diary. “Before each performance, the instruments were shown to the children and the themes played for them; during the performance, the children heard the themes repeated several times and learned to recognize the timbres of the different instruments. The text was read during the pauses in the music, which was disproportionately longer than the text — for me, the story was important only as a means of inducing the children to listen to the music.”
“Peter and the Wolf” was premiered on May 2nd, 1936, and quickly became a staple in children’s concerts worldwide. For decades, it became the way young listeners truly understood each instrument’s sound.
“Peter and the Wolf” Characters by Instruments
The spoken story of “Peter and the Wolf” depicts a boy (Peter) roaming through nature, when he sees a duck, a bird, and a cat. Peter’s grandfather later admonishes him for wandering off, where he could fall prey to a wolf. He looks at the same scene and indeed sees a wolf, which eats the duck and threatens the bird and the cat. Peter sneaks out and ties up the wolf. Hunters arrive on the scene and want to kill the wolf, but Peter talks them into taking it to a zoo instead.
For each character, Prokofiev utilizes a certain instrument and a small musical motif:
- Bird – flute.
- Duck – oboe.
- Cat – clarinet
- Grandfather – bassoon
- Wolf – three horns
- Peter – strings
- Hunter’s gunshots – timpani and bass drum
The story’s narration provides scaffolding for first-time listeners, while the music teaches timbre and motif recognition.
One of the most notable motifs is Peter’s, which opens with an arpeggiated C major triad before introducing harmonically surprising chords that give Peter’s theme its sense of wonder. Prokofiev uses many chromatic chord movements to elicit Peter’s curiosity and wonder. As Deborah Rifkin writes in Music Theory Online, Prokofiev references C major, Ab major, Eb major, and G major – “a veritable cornucopia of chromatic mediants” – in just eight measures. It concludes with a perfect, authentic cadence, meaning a V-I resolution with the tonic scale degree in the highest voice of the tonic chord, in measure 8.
Hear that exploratory nature alongside Davis’ narration from the new LA Phil album:
No matter the changing musical landscape, there will always be a place for orchestral music. Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” has been part of carrying on the tradition for nearly 100 years. The LA Phil’s new recording solidifies that tradition with a high-production entry point that keeps music education vibrant.
