Sergei Prokofiev
Russian, 1891–1953
Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat major, Op. 83 (1942)
III. Precipitato
Recommended recording: Ayako Uehara, piano (EMI Classics, 2008)
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Fernand Léger
French, 1881–1955
The City (1919)
Oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art
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Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Léger’s The City presents a vibrant vision of post-World War I urban life through the lens of Cubism. Monumental in scale, the painting immerses the viewer in a dense metropolis of architectural fragments and mechanized forms. Rejecting traditional perspective, Léger constructs space through overlapping geometric planes, flattened angles, and vibrant colors, creating a visual language that conveys both the structural complexity and pulsating energy of the modern city. Fragmented typography blurs the line between representation and abstraction, evoking the sensory overload of bustling streets.
Within this compressed urban environment, human figures appear as abstracted forms that mirror the surrounding architecture, likening the body to the machinery of industrial life. The repetition of vertical elements (lines, ladders, scaffolds, stairs) creates a sense of visual rhythm, similar to how patterns of beats and accents create motion in music. The viewer’s eye does not rest; it moves across the painting in a patterned flow. In this way, Léger translates the restless energy of urban life into pictorial form.
Léger’s service in the French army during World War I profoundly shaped his approach to modernity, as the scale and power of mechanized warfare informed his fascination with industrial imagery. This was a preoccupation of the age, a moment when artists and intellectuals across Europe were rethinking what it meant to live, work, and create in an industrialized world.
A similarly intense engagement with modernity appears in the third movement (Precipitato) of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata. Composed during World War II, the sonata belongs to Prokofiev’s group of so-called “War Sonatas,” works shaped by the anxiety of the wartime period and the political pressures of life in the Soviet Union.
The Precipitato serves as the frenetic, tempestuous finale of the sonata, defined by its hurried rhythmic drive and percussive treatment of the piano. The movement’s opening section (0:00–0:58 in the recording by Ayako Uehara) centers on B-flat major chords that are hammered insistently at the keyboard. Although the music is ostensibly anchored in B-flat major, its tonal stability is frequently disrupted by harsh dissonances and aggressive accents.
The contrasting central section (0:58–2:31) shifts to a higher register and thinner texture, juxtaposing jagged, playful melodic fragments with smoother, more lyrical lines. The music then recapitulates its opening (2:31) and drives toward an explosive coda.
Rather than developing melodic themes, Prokofiev constructs the movement from block-like units of rhythm and harmony that accumulate and collide, propelled by repeated ostinato patterns that generate relentless motion. This fragmentation of musical ideas into rhythmic and harmonic blocks parallels modernist strategies in visual art. Just as Cubist painters present multiple spatial perspectives simultaneously, Prokofiev projects multiple tonal perspectives—initially through the interplay of B-flat major and B-flat minor, and later, at the end of the coda (3:18), through moments of bitonality that set B-flat major against C, D, A, and B major.
Prokofiev likewise presents multiple metrical perspectives: rather than using a simple meter such as 3/4 or 4/4, wherein each beat is equivalent in length, he employs an irregular 7/8 pattern, subdivided 2+3+2. It is as though he has elongated the central beat of 3/4 meter—or compressed the central two beats of 4/4 meter—as a way of conflating different metrical frameworks.
Taken together, Léger’s The City and Prokofiev’s Precipitato present modernity not as a unified style but as a condition of discontinuity. In both works, structure emerges from the interaction of discrete units that favor fragmentation, accumulation, and relentless motion over coherent linear development. By mirroring the frantic, fragmented reality of their time, both artists turned the chaos of the industrial age into a new kind of mechanized beauty.
© 2026 Troy Etter