Sergei Prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev is one of the most beloved composers in the Russian tradition. Tchaikovsky is probably the most beloved, but he belonged to a generation that privileged accessibility and sentiment, whereas Prokofiev was a hard-edged modernist. That said, his gift for melody is matchless, as evidenced by the copyright-infringing influence he has had on popular music, Hollywood, and musicals. Prokofiev’s piano sonatas are staples in the repertoire, and his sonatas for flute and violin standard fare in recitals. His canonical status belies three obstacles: the logistical, financial, and political challenges he faced in getting his major works (especially the operas) performed; the censorship of some of his music; and his utterly terrible timing. Pursuit of prestige did him no favors, nor did his prickly personality, but his talent was unique and adaptable: he wrote music for children, prima ballerinas, soldiers on the front line, filmgoers, virtuosi, and Stalin.

Early Years: Prodigious Beginning, Diverse Output

Prokofiev spent his youth in Imperial Russia as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, but after the 1917 October Revolution relocated to the West, travelling through the United States, France, and Germany. He created a niche for himself as a modernist rabble-rouser, resisting the conservative dictates of his teachers (Alexander Glazunov, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Tcherepnin) and competing with Stravinsky for critical attention as well as commissions. Prokofiev himself recognized that he was composing as a riposte to prove his command of traditional idioms while also blazing a path forward to the new. His popular “Classical” Symphony No. 1 (1916–17) thus stands in marked contrast to the raw primitivism of his cantata Seven, They Are Seven (1917–18, rev. 1933) and the songs that he wrote to texts by the Silver Age poets Konstantin Balmont (1921) and Anna Akhmatova (1916).

He built up an international career, yet didn’t achieve the success in the West that he believed he deserved. For the Chicago Opera Association, he composed The Love for Three Oranges (1919), an opera indebted to the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition, which gained a toehold in the repertoire despite baffling the critics. Between 1915 and 1929, he wrote three ballets for the Paris-based Ballets Russes: the neo-primitivist Chout (The Buffoon) (1915, rev. 1920), the constructivist Le pas d’acier (The Steel Step) (1926), and the neo-Classical Le fils prodigue (The Prodigal Son) (1928–29)—an early success for choreographer George Balanchine. The late 1920s and early 1930s were a comparatively fallow period when Prokofiev explored an amorphous style that he called “new simplicity” (similar to Aaron Copland’s “imposed simplicity” of the same era). The 1928 piano piece Choses en soi (Things in Themselves) marks his pivot, as does a short ballet score composed for Serge Lifar, Sur le Borysthène (On the Dnipro) (1932). The river of sound allegorizes the emotional and psychological journey of the protagonist, a Red Army soldier coming back home after the First World War who reunites with his sweetheart only to find himself drawn to another woman, herself unhappily engaged. The drama is thoroughly melancholic. Ultimately, the protagonist comes to understand that the home he once had is gone forever.

Middle and Late Periods: Return to a Russia that Wasn’t

Prokofiev grew tired of the peripatetic concert life and, in 1936—after years of travel and several frustrated efforts to organize a production of his supernatural opera The Fiery Angel (1919–23, rev. 1926–7) in Europe—officially resettled in Russia. He made the move slowly, returning for several short visits to gauge official and public reaction to his music, mindful that he might not be forgiven for his years in the decadent, capitalist West, and that the music he had composed for Serge Diaghilev and other expat entrepreneurs ran afoul of what Soviet ideologues expected from Soviet composers: tunefulness, sentiment, Romanticism, and Marxist-Leninist content. Stalin’s regime was desperate to reclaim celebrities who had left, and Prokofiev fell for the promises of regular commissions from the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theaters, comfortable housing, performance opportunities for his wife Lina (a soprano), and hassle-free foreign travel. The past was past, he was assured, and so long as he accommodated Soviet audiences, all would be fine.

It wasn’t. The 1930s and 1940s brought ruin to the lives of Prokofiev’s wife and their two sons, and also compromised the composer’s health. Friends and neighbors disappeared in the Purges of the Great Terror; Lina was arrested in 1948 on charges of treason and sent to a prison camp in the Russian north. That same year, Prokofiev was denounced and stripped of his income. The reasons? His failure to connect with the Soviet public, his adherence to modernist trends considered alien to the ideals of the Revolution, and the perks he had received from the Union of Soviet Composers. He never recovered from the setback. His final opera, The Story of a Real Man (1947–48), and final ballet, The Tale of a Stone Flower (1953), are uneven works that he never saw staged.

Before the denunciation, before Lina’s arrest, and before his family fell apart (Prokofiev took up with another woman, his eventual second wife Mira Mendelson), there were some genuine creative successes: the pedagogical children’s parable Peter and the Wolf (1936); the scores to the films Lieutenant Kijé (1934), Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1942–5); and the Soviet court ballet Cinderella (1940–44). Still, Prokofiev’s music was routinely censored, and at times banned. The cool formalism of his Third Piano Concerto (1917–21) was deemed part of the past, along with the sarcastic elements of his early style, and anything evidencing his spiritual outlook as a Christian Scientist was strictly forbidden. The original “happy ending” of his ballet masterpiece Romeo and Juliet (1935–6) was rejected by Soviet defenders of the classics; his Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution (1936–7)—a massive score that undercut (in the opinion of the censors) Communist ideals, as articulated by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin—was not performed during his lifetime; and his monumental opera War and Peace suffered through four revisions between 1942 and 1952.

Prokofiev’s musical language simplified over time, and he produced agitprop on demand, including a 60th-birthday present for Stalin called Zdravitsa (A Toast) (1939) and a 1950 oratorio, On Guard for Peace, which concerns the nuclear arms race (doves were meant to be released at the premiere). But Prokofiev could also, during the grimmest of times, produce extraordinarily potent scores. His Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Piano Sonatas (1939–44) are cases in point: the music has no specific meaning and therefore can mean many different things—from the tragedy of the Second World War to the turmoil of Prokofiev’s own life. Stress and disappointments took their toll. Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953, the same day as Stalin.

Music and the Divine

For Prokofiev, the most crucial moment in the creative process was the first, when a musical gesture sprang into his mind. This was the moment when his music existed in its purest state, when it was closest to the divine. For this reason, perhaps, Prokofiev took special care with his sketches. The clarity of the notation in these earliest drafts is astonishing. His initial ideas are beautifully preserved, written clearly in pencil then traced over in pen.

The inspiration, for Prokofiev, remained pure—in part, because he did not always compose with a specific context (much less a particular purpose) in mind. When assembling a score, he rooted through his sketchbooks for suitable melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material. Even when those musical ideas were then attached to political texts, they maintained, in his view, their creative freedom. Prokofiev also shifted his melodies from work to work, again reflecting his faith that music remained somehow apart from the piece itself. The catchiest tune in his Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October, for example, recurs in his Ode to the End of the War (1945).

And he believed that his music would endure. He composed for posterity, preserving his manuscripts for future listeners to hear in better (or worse) times.

Watching and Listening

Prokofiev composed chamber music on each side of his triangular career: Imperial Russia, the West (the United States and Europe), and the Soviet Union. The Chamber Music Society traces these three sides as well, beginning with the graphic experimentalism of his pianistic Sarcasms, performed here by Juho Pohjonen, to his Overture on Hebrew Themes, composed in New York in 1919. Desperately low on funds, Prokofiev accepted a modest commission from another expat musician, the clarinetist Simeon Bellison, the founder of the Jewish music ensemble Zimro. David Shifrin performs the clarinet part here. The first of Prokofiev’s two string quartets was commissioned by the Library of Congress, the second conceived during Soviet wartime evacuation in the Caucasus. The Sonata for Two Violins belongs to 1932 and the period of Prokofiev’s “new simplicity.” It was “good” music, he commented, that had been inspired by a “bad” work—a dull piece for two violins by another (unidentified) composer.

Both of Prokofiev’s violin sonatas date from his Soviet years. No. 1, which took eight years to complete, is organized in the slow-fast-slow-fast structure of Handel’s solo string pieces, with the opening movement depicting, according to the composer, wind through a cemetery. Bruce Adolphe describes the whole in this lecture. No. 2, a transcription of Prokofiev’s 1943 Flute Sonata, chases away the darkness. The stranger delights of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet are captured in Vadim Borisovsky’s arrangements, for viola and piano, of selections from the suites.

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