Serge Prokofiev

“Prokofiev? Certainly the greatest living Russian composer… after me!”

Thus did Igor Stravinsky, with a sarcasm worthy of his colleague’s opus 17, pay his respects to the author of Peter and the Wolf. As for the rivalry between these two men between the world wars, history remembers that one of them changed the course of music and the other did not. Prokofiev’s dissonances may have ruffled the listening habits of some contemporaries, but they in no way broke the classical mold. Be that as it may, with his fifty-year career Prokofiev became one of the major composers of the twentieth century, bequeathing a fascinating artistic legacy in a language that has kept its originality. Francis Poulenc called him “the poet of the white keys” for the diatonicism of certain of his works.¹ The popularity of scores such as Peter and the Wolf, the March from The Love of Three Oranges, the Classical Symphony, and Romeo and Juliet cannot obscure the variety and richness of his oeuvre, ranging as it does from fiendish percussiveness to the most moving lyricism. His 138 opus numbers extend to nearly every genre, from opera to chamber music, piano music (a quarter of his output) to film scores, symphonies to songs. By a singular irony of fate, this life buffeted by the tempests of history, traversing wars and revolutions, came to an end on the very day of Stalin’s death, 5 March 1953. While the young Prokofiev made his name as a piano virtuoso and provocative apostle of modernity in the Russia of Nicholas II, Western exile between the wars allowed him to build an international reputation. An uncompromising, orgulous character, he courted disaster with his definitive return, wife and children in tow, to Russia in the midst of Stalin’s terror. The reasons for this artistic turnaround were multiple (desire to reset his career? nostalgia for the homeland?), and they had tangible consequences for the output of his “Soviet period.”

“The main virtue of my life (or, if you prefer, its main downfall) has always been the search for originality in my musical language. I have a horror of imitation and of what is already known.”

Sergey Sergeyevich

Prokofiev grew up in a Chekhovian environment, nestled in the family property in the Ukraine, introduced to music by his piano-playing mother. His first compositions were early and ambitious, as witness the opera The Giant that he wrote at eight years old after discovering Gounod’s Faust. The Russo-Ukrainian popular songs heard in the area influenced his style too, as his first teacher Reinhold Glière recalled. Aware of his pupil’s formidable talent, Glière taught him the rudiments of harmony and orchestration under the supervision of Sergey Taneyev, who alerted Prokofiev to the harmonic poverty of his first symphonic essays. His fund of melody, however, was already rich; in 1917-1918 he reused themes from his youth in the Ballade for Cello and Piano and Piano Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4 (the latter subtitled “From Old Notebooks”).

Prokofiev’s time at the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire, which he entered at fifteen in 1904, was marked by conflicts engendered by his own self-assurance. He was bored by counterpoint lessons with Anatoly Lyadov and openly criticized Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration class (Shostakovitch supposedly said that he never learned to orchestrate properly as a result), though he admired Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Kitezh. Perhaps more important for his development was the rapport that he struck up with his classmate Nikolai Myaskovsky, a lifelong friendship that gave him precious opportunities to exchange ideas.

While his early scores (such as the disappointing First Piano Sonata) still show a composite style influenced by Schumann, Strauss, Debussy, Rachmaninov, and Scriabin, the Four Études, op. 2 (1909), dedicated to his piano teacher Alexander Winkler, “break with the feeble sentimentality of the time,” according to Myaskovsky. The infernal spirit of the first étude returns with a vengeance in Suggestion diabolique (“already Prokofiev in pure form,” writes Poulenc); so does the dream-state of the second in the slow movement of the First Piano Concerto, the motoric rhythms of the third in the implacable Toccata, and the aggressivity of the fourth in the Sarcasmes. These piano pieces made Prokofiev a symbol of modernity and renewal for the Russian public.

In 1909, after Rimsky-Korsakov’s death, Prokofiev joined the piano studio of Anna Yesipova, who for five years tried to tame his fiery temperament enough to give him a solid piano technique (something he put to good use in later scores). At the same time, he became familiar with the classical symphonic canon through conducting lessons with Nikolay Tcherepnin. Alongside these musical influences, the literary Symbolism of poets such as Konstantin Balmont inspired a part of his work, especially in his songs, through 1921 (the year of the remarkable and very chromatic opus 36 song cycle. In 1911, meanwhile, Prokofiev set to work on another opera, Maddalena; though he finished only the first four scenes, these too showed great promise, anticipating the lyric masterpieces The Fiery Angel (with regard to the character Renata) and The Love of Three Oranges (in its anti-psychological approach). But it was at the piano above all that Prokofiev found an outlet for his creativity in the early 1910s. The First Piano Concerto — “the first of my compositions with some maturity in the conception and realization” — already displays his characteristic duality of frenetic energy and melancholy lyricism. His personality likewise emerges in all its contrasting characters, from boisterous sarcasm to somber meditation, in the Second Piano Sonata of 1912.

The uproar around Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris on 29 May 1913 echoes in another succès de scandale, more modest but important for the establishment of Prokofiev’s reputation: the premiere in Pavlovsk of his Second Piano Concerto, whose “futurism” roused much of the audience to wrath. A meditative introduction gives way to an onslaught of roaring chords and cascading arpeggios in one of the longest, most demanding, and most exhilarating cadenzas in the repertoire. The vehemence of certain passages and the poignant folk melody of the finale may express Prokofiev’s angry sorrow at the suicide of his closest friend Maximilian Schmidthof, to whom he dedicated the score (as well as his dark Fourth Piano Sonata). The tonal scheme around G minor and the form are still anchored in the classical universe, but Prokofiev’s melodic verve and rhythmic imagination had now reached full artistic maturity (though it is true that he revised the work ten years later). He built on this experiment in the Third Piano Concerto, finished in 1921 but sketched during this fertile pre-war period.

Shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, Prokofiev received a first prize in the Rubinstein Piano Competition, but it was his encounter with another Sergei, the impresario Diaghilev of Ballets Russes fame, that gave him a fresh wind. His ballet Ala and Lolly, despite recreating orchestrally the power of his piano writing, met with Diaghilev’s rejection due to its scenario, a knock-off of Stravinsky’s Rite. Rebaptized as Scythian Suite, the music provoked criticism in 1916. By that time, Prokofiev was working on a new ballet, satirical this time, to be entitled Chout (The Buffoon) and premiered with success in Paris in 1921; the similarities between this Cubist work and Petrushka by the unavoidable Igor need no comment. Satire and bitter laughter also characterize the 1914 Sarcasmes for piano: “We realize how pitiful and miserable is the object of our derision; we then experience a strange feeling: laughter goes on ringing in our ears, but now it is directed at us.”

At the height of the October Revolution, which he watched from afar, Prokofiev completed one of his most popular piano works, Visions fugitives, sometimes regarded as a descendant of Chopin’s preludes. After the sonic orgy of the lavishly orchestrated Scythian Suite, Prokofiev emerged as a master miniaturist in these twenty pieces, which fall somewhere between Satie and Poulenc. After putting aside his opera project The Gambler (after Dostoyevsky’s novella), rejected by the performers as “unsingable,” he flouted the temper of the times in his First Symphony, subtitled “Classical” in homage to Joseph Haydn and premiered under his own direction on 21 April 1918. Though intended “to tease the geese,” the work would become, as Prokofiev hoped, “genuinely classical with time.” Far from contenting himself with pastiche, he wrote the music that Haydn would have written in the twentieth century — within a conventional frame, certainly, but with a verve, gait, and humor (not to mention dissonances and modulations) that Franz Joseph would not have disavowed.

Taking up another classical form around this time, Prokofiev gave the violin repertoire one of its gems in his Violin Concerto No. 1, the first movement of which unfolds with remarkable delicacy. Then, true to his fondness for contrast, he responded to the outbreak of the October Revolution with a score as brief as it is striking, a “Chaldean Invocation for Orchestra, Chorus, and Tenor” entitled Seven, They Are Seven. In this impetuous, hallucinatory music on a poem by Balmont, roaring walls of sound surround a diabolical theme, one of those maleficent figures that crop up again and again in his music. With this musical “exorcism” (as Michel Dorigné calls it) Prokofiev took his leave of Russia, now Soviet, to embark on what is often considered the second phase of his career.

The Wandering Russian

Prokofiev’s brief sojourn in the United States resulted in the moving Overture on Jewish Themes, written (with augmented seconds aplenty) for Saint Petersburg colleagues now exiled in New York. More importantly, it gave rise to the opera The Love of Three Oranges, an iconoclastic creation with a cheerfully absurd scenario adapted from a play by Carlo Gozzi. Taking after Mozart’s Magic Flute, Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel, Prokofiev etches a musical identity for each character. This score of frenzied rhythms seems to presage the cinematographic writing he developed later in collaboration with Sergei Eisenstein.

In New York, Prokofiev started work on another opera, The Fiery Angel, which he completed in 1927. Based on a novel by Valery Bryusov and set in a sixteenth-century world of mystical visions and demonic encounters, the opera explores the impossible love of the knight Ruprecht for the beautiful, demoniac Renata. Its expressionistic score is driven by obsessive ostinato rhythms. Prokofiev ended up repurposing some of its abundant orchestra material for his Third Symphony. The diatonicism of certain leitmotivs derives from what he called his “White Quartet,” a string quartet in C major without accidentals abandoned in 1918.

The seaside village of Saint-Brevin-les-Pins in France can boast of having hosted Prokofiev during the composition, in the summer of 1921, of his most popular work after Peter and the Wolf: the Third Piano Concerto. Partly based on the “White Quartet,” this fabulously dynamic score in C major, which he recorded in 1932, moved Balmont to declare that “the invincible Scythian has struck the tambourine of the sun.”

Prokofiev turned once again to a form with over a century of history for his intriguing polytonal Second Symphony, an ultra-dissonant, mechanistic score that he described as being made “of iron and steel.” The music follows the formal model of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32, with two movements: a sonata-allegro and then a theme and variations. Prokofiev extended this spirit of “constructivism” to the stage in a ballet about Soviet Russia, intended for Diaghilev, Le Pas d’acier (The Steel Step, or in Russian Stal’noy skok — a title chosen by Diaghilev). Despite its extreme asperity, stretches of the music are rigorously diatonic: “A very decisive step led me from chromaticism to the diatonicism of the white keys,” Prokofiev remarked. The shadow of Beethoven also hangs over his First String Quartet (1931), whose poignant final Andante he later reworked for piano and orchestra. The influence of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism is again evident here, as well as in the contemporaneous ballet Trapeze for five instruments.

Dogged by the bad luck that affected nearly all his operatic ventures, Prokofiev returned in 1927 to the Gambler, which he had begun in 1915. Its Brussels premiere in 1929 led nowhere. His prose libretto and declamatory style marked a clear break from the conventions of traditional opera. “The scene of the gambling house is absolutely new in the operatic literature,” he had boasted back in 1916. “All in all, it amounts to a tightly organized chaos, with its extreme rapidity and complexity of action.”

After an excursion into abstraction with the piano suite Things in Themselves, Prokofiev composed his final score for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: The Prodigal Son. The work features a purified style inspired by the Bible story. As with The Fiery Angel, Prokofiev later reused some of its thematic material for his Fourth Symphony, itself heavily rewritten in 1947.

After the failure of his ballet On the Dnieper and a few fruitless projects for solo piano, he wrote a Piano Concerto for the Left Hand for Paul Wittgenstein, who rejected it outright, as well as an attractive Sonata for Two Violins. Among his works of the early 1930s a clear standout is the Fifth Piano Concerto; of its five virtuosic movements, the Larghetto is a favorite, once again for its lyricism and harmonic beauty. Preaching a “new simplicity” (expounded in an article for the magazine Europe), Prokofiev accepted his first Soviet commission with music for the film Lieutenant Kijé. The Kantian aridity of Things in Themselves resurfaces in the three Pensées for piano, the second of which he considered one of his major works. He later gave it an orchestral counterpart in the enigmatic Symphonic Song. His last great “Western” score, the Second Violin Concerto, written for Robert Soetens, plays with the contrast between the sunny lyricism of its first two movements and the vicious sarcasm of its finale.

Back to “Ussria”

Prokofiev’s definitive return to what he sometimes called “Urssie” (from the French form of USSR) took place under the sign of Romeo and Juliet. This ballet has taken its place as a classic of both symphonic and choreographic repertories, following in the lineage of Tchaikovsky. Conceived one year before the evergreen Peter and the Wolf, it offers a shining example of the composer’s melodic genius, combining flamboyant orchestration with rhythmic invention. It remains the most faithful musical realization of Shakespeare’s work, ahead of Bernstein’s West Side Story, and though its first performers found it “undanceable,” it marks a true renewal of modern dance.

Neither the frankly jolly Russian Overture nor the remarkable ballet Eugene Onegin (partly recycled for the opera War and Peace) or the Three Songs for the centenary of Pushkin’s death can mask the tribulations that Prokofiev faced in the 1930s. To prove his Soviet credentials, he wrote a Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution on words by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, a colossal work for five hundred performers that would not be performed until 1966. When writing his dutiful incidental music for Hamlet, he seems to have shared something of the hero’s existential doubt, putting his creative activity on hold for several months.

It was at this moment that the director Sergei Eisenstein entered the scene of Prokofiev’s career in the role of providential alter ego, proposing their first collaboration for the historical drama Alexander Nevsky. Beyond the obvious political resonance in 1938 of Russian armies facing off against Teutonic Knights, the film made cinematic history for its soundtrack, especially in the scene of the battle on ice, where the German warriors’ ponderous theme seems to drag them down into the icy depths. With his instinct for contrast, Prokofiev set the themes of the warring camps (later reused in his cantata of the same name) against each other in a musical struggle that is both cunning and ferocious.

The “Bolshevik” opera Semyon Kotko, premiered in 1940, marks a shift from the new simplicity of Prokofiev’s early 1930s style toward a naïve simplism, infused with popular music from his native Ukraine and characterized by rhythms that repeat and circle back on themselves. Indulgent critics such as Dorigné have nevertheless defended some parts of this work. In collaboration with his second wife, Mira Mendelssohn, Prokofiev next turned to opéra comique in Betrothal in a Monastery, based on Sheridan, extending the tradition of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte and Verdi’s Falstaff through a number of melodic and harmonic novelties.

What the Russians call the “Great Patriotic War” was a period of intense creativity for Prokofiev, resulting firstly in his Sixth Piano Sonata, the first of a series of “wartime sonatas.” Inspired by Romain Rolland’s Beethoven, the music opens with a storm, which the secondary theme tries to calm before being shattered by a violent outburst (literally: the marking reads col pugno: “with the fist”). Between this movement and the equally brusque finale, the march and slow waltz are quintessential Prokofiev. The Seventh Sonata (1942) is a highlight of the modern piano literature, a work in which, as Poulenc remarked, “the fingers lead the brain” and whose biting dissonances verge on atonality. Between the mordant chromaticism of the first movement and the final septuple-meter deluge, the bell-like sonorities of the central section impart a mystic dimension. Compulsory evacuation to the Caucasus put Prokofiev in contact with Kabardian traditional music, on which he drew for his Second String Quartet.

Once again with help from Mendelssohn, during this period Prokofiev conceived of an operatic adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a project on which he would work intermittently for eleven years, from 1941 to 1952. Under pressure from the authorities, he cut back the intimate scenes (the most successful ones) in favor of grand military tableaux, featuring a dignified Napoleon — an obvious stand-in for the invader Hitler — and the glorious general Kutuzov, representing Stalin. Prokofiev’s style comes through in many passages, including the formidable waltzes, later integrated into orchestral works.

After the elemental cantata Ballad of an Unknown Boy, Prokofiev joined Eisenstein in Alma-Ata to work on the film Ivan the Terrible. The score portrays the remoteness, cruelty, and political wiles of a czar often likened to the “Little Father of the Peoples.” Like an erupting volcano, Prokofiev then produced in quick succession an Eighth Piano Sonata, a radiant Flute Sonata (transcribed for violin by David Oistrakh), and the ballet Cinderella, which after the war became another pillar of the ballet repertoire, notable once again for Prokofiev’s poignantly bittersweet use of the waltz. “I strove to reveal in the dances the poetry of Cinderella’s love for the prince, which is the center of the subject and of the musical canvas,” he recalled.

This torrent of creativity culminated in 1944 with the Symphony No. 5 — “the summation of a lifetime of creation,” by the composer’s own account. “I conceived of it as a work to exalt the grandeur of the human spirit.” A musical epic in four movements, this opus 100 is a worthy successor to the landmarks of the repertoire, yet retains Prokofiev’s hallmarks: lyricism, polyrhythm, toccatas, ostinatos, and sarcasm. To its first listeners, its jubilant finale announced the end of the war. Despite its forbidding density (Sviatoslav Richter called it “a tree sagging under the weight of its fruit”), the Eighth Piano Sonata, finished at the same time, testifies to this same collective rejoicing — soon to be clouded by Party decrees — in the exhilarating triplets of its finale.

Undeterred by his busy production of scores to fulfil the ideological or ceremonial expectations set by the Soviet state — including the Ode to the End of the War, the cantatas Flourish, Mighty Land (for the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution) and The Meeting of the Volga and the Don, the propaganda opera Story of a Real Man, the oratorio On Guard for Peace, the popular ballet The Stone Flower, and the fairy tale for children Winter Bonfire — Prokofiev’s genius burst forth once again after the war. Foremost among these achievements is the First Violin Sonata, with its somber introduction, hammer blows marked marcatissimo e pesante in the Allegro brusco movement, poignantly tender Andante, and vertiginously acrobatic finale in feverish alternations of five-, seven-, and eight-beat measures, before the return of the gloomy opening. The same pessimism characterizes the Sixth Symphony, opus 111, dedicated to Beethoven: “each of us bears irreparable wounds,” the composer wrote. “Some mourn their loved ones, others lose their health. We must not forget it.” Only the last of the three movements shows a trace of a smile, but more than ever this seems like the meekness of a despair that ultimately gets the upper hand.

Simplicity is the keyword for the Piano Sonata No. 9 in C major (1947), in which Prokofiev returned to his “white notes” in the surpassingly delicate first movement, the staccato scales of the Allegro strepitoso, the meditative variations of the slow movement, and the athletic freshness of the finale. The following year, alongside Shostakovich and Khachaturian, he was temporarily but harshly censured by the regime for “musical formalism.”

A final major creative collaborator, the young Mstislav Rostropovich, inspired a series of remarkable works from Prokofiev: the Cello Sonata, the Sinfonia concertante for Cello and Orchestra (a reworking of an unsatisfactory concerto from 1939), and a Concertino left unfinished. Prokofiev completed his last large score in 1952, Symphony No. 7, written for young listeners and imbued with a wistful nostalgia for his own past. “Listening to works such as your Seventh Symphony renders life easier to live and more joyous,” Shostakovich wrote to him in October 1952. Prokofiev died five months later.

Evoking “the dry rattle of these five consonants, PRKFV,” Eisenstein stressed that

Prokofiev is profoundly Russian. His is not the conventional pseudo-realist Russia of kvass and cabbage soup, of small native customs as celebrated in paintings by [Vasily] Perov or [Ilya] Repin. He belongs to the Russian tradition that goes back to the primitive Scythians and the inimitable art of the thirteenth-century stonecutters, of the churches in Vladimir and Suzdal. He is Russian by virtue of going back to the sources that shaped the national soul [...] This is why Prokofiev knows how to render time so beautifully in music, not through archaism or pastiche but by turning to what is most extreme, risky, abrupt in ultra-modern music.²

^{1. Francis Poulenc, liner note for Serge Prokofiev, Concerto No. 3 en ut majeur pour piano et orchestre, LP record, La Voix de son maître, series “Les gravures illustres” (COLH34), 1958. ↩}

^{2. Sergei Eisenstein, Réflexions d’un cinéaste (Moscow, 1958), p. 166-167. ↩}