Prokofiev’s Problems—and Ours

The concluding discursive chapter surveys the vicissitudes of Prokofiev’s life and creative career. In particular, it examines the personal and professional tragedy—indeed, the catastrophe—of the composer’s later years, considers the problems Prokofiev faced in setting morally questionable texts, and confronts the dilemma they pose for us as listeners, beguiled by the musical strength and/or beauty of works like the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution, Zdravitsa!, or the film music for Ivan the Terrible, but perhaps unable to ignore their more sinister undertones.

Prokofiev, Soviet Influence, and the Music World in Stalinist Central Europe

In the aftermath of World War II, the Red Army as a symbol of power was supported in many other arenas so as to counteract the rival influence of the United States on Central Europe. The Soviet Union brought new urgency to these efforts from 1948, with music—and culture more broadly—providing a case for Russia’s attractiveness and superiority with respect to the West. This chapter discusses the nature and scope of Soviet influence in the Central European music world through the examples of East Germany and Poland, and through the prism of the music and persona of Sergei Prokofiev. After his return to the USSR in 1936, Prokofiev, along with Shostakovich, became associated with the very definition of what made music Soviet and thus worthy of emulation. And even more than Shostakovich, Prokofiev and his music functioned as powerful but malleable symbols that could be appropriated by all Soviet actors for their own ends.

“Things in Themselves”

Hidden in the composer’s archives is a series of little music-manuscript notebooks, a bit battered, as if they had been in and out of Prokofiev’s pockets. These he carried around with him, jotting down musical ideas as and when they occurred to him. The contents of such notebooks can reveal quite special aspects of their creator, exposing facets of the imagination which may well lie below the threshold of even that creator’s consciousness. Are the themes notated boldly in ink or tentatively in pencil? How important are indications of tempo or dynamics in comparison with pitches, meters, rhythms, or key signatures? What kind of second thoughts appeared at this early stage? Above all, what are the characteristics that make these themes so distinctively, unmistakably Prokofiev? This study of his thematic sketches opens up entirely new insights into the way he thought, what his compositional priorities were, and how he expressed himself to himself.

The Five Piano Concertos

Across Prokofiev’s oeuvre, his piano works—and especially his piano concertos—hold a special place. A consummate pianist, he realized early on that, among various performers, he himself was the most persuasive advocate for his music. His appearances as a pianist were opportunities to present his compositions to various international audiences. Each of the piano concertos was a harbinger of important stylistic shifts in the composer’s output in general, and his piano music in particular. This chapter examines each of these works separately, looking into the circumstances of their creation, as well as the changes in Prokofiev’s style demonstrated by each of them. It explores the peculiarities of his writing for piano and the challenges it presents to the performer. By also looking into the changes in Prokofiev’s approach to the instrument as revealed in each concerto, it offers some practical solutions that may be helpful to pianists.

“Yea, Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death . . .”

Images of Thanatos, or death, appear in Prokofiev’s output in a variety of contexts. Thoughts of death threw many shadows over the young composer, despite his naturally happy disposition; but from the 1920s, as a Christian Scientist, he tried to see death as merely a human aberration. His musical works are nonetheless full of death images. Different cultural-historical traditions are drawn upon, reflecting his own life experiences. Ancient mythological and magical beliefs, as well as Christian motives, rub shoulders with positivism and with interpretations of Bolshevism as a secular religion. By exploring concepts of Thanatos in a wide range of Prokofiev’s theater works—from Maddalena, Chout, and The Fiery Angel to Semyon Kotko, Romeo and Juliet, and War and Peace—this chapter casts new light on the composer’s emotional attitudes toward the mysteries of death, as well as revealing special psychological depths in his musical ideas.

Staging Prokofiev’s Early Ballets

As a composer for dance, Prokofiev has an international standing in the twentieth century that was second only to Stravinsky. Both composed specific scores for ballet and both have had other works mined by choreographers for new productions. Yet even now Prokofiev’s reputation as a composer for dance rests largely upon just two scores, both for full-program ballets: Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella. In this, Prokofiev differs from Stravinsky. However, it was as a composer of shorter, more experimental pieces—mostly written for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—that Prokofiev not only learned his craft as a ballet composer but also refined his theatrical and musical idioms. His music for Chout, Trapèze, Le Pas d’Acier, and L’Enfant Prodigue were formative in his stylistic evolution. This chapter traces the development, design, production, and early reception of these relatively unfamiliar works and their later revivals.

From Film Score to Art Music and Back

Sergei Prokofiev was one of a few composers who worked equally successfully in the fields of film music and art music. His scores for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible are as significant for the history of film music as are his operas and ballets for musical theater. He approached film projects with the same creative rigor as his stage and symphonic works. And so we must think of his film scores not as a separate enterprise but, rather, as one of the various theatrical and dramatic genres at which he tried his hand. While the operatic features of his music for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible have become widely recognized, Prokofiev’s other film scores can also be placed in a broader context of the composer’s output. The cross-connections between genres can be traced at different levels, from common themes and literary ideas and similar stylistic evolution, to shared compositional techniques and borrowings of musical material from one work to another.

The Sun-Sounding Scythian

The chapter examines the relationships between Prokofiev’s early music and the poets that inspired him. Guided by Konstantin Balmont’s poetic characterization of him in the early 1920s as a “sun-sounding Scythian,” it looks at two specific facets of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism that informed Prokofiev’s works: the sun cult and Scythianism. Prokofiev’s luminous Scythianism encompasses the paradox of the lyricism of his early songs and the perceived barbarism of his rejected ballet Ala and Lolli, from which the composer derived his Scythian Suite. By analyzing Prokofiev’s collaboration with Gorodetskii on Ala and Lolli and the composer’s settings of Balmont’s and Akhmatova’s poems, we can understand how the incarnations of the sun god in the Russian Silver Age informed both the sunrise music and the aesthetics of horror in the ballet and the suite. The chapter also reflects on Ala and Lolli as an unrealized ballet in the shadow of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Sergei Prokofiev and Levon Atovmian

The name of Levon Atovmian is largely unknown. Yet he was a most important and influential figure in the development of Soviet culture: a musical impresario, company director, bureaucrat, publisher, editor, and arranger, as well as close friend and confidant of many distinguished Soviet composers. His role in Prokofiev’s later life cannot be overestimated. He played a leading, practical part in the composer’s return home in 1936. He promoted the commissioning of some of the most significant of Prokofiev’s later works, and arranged for piano all of his Soviet-period operas, oratorios, and ballets. He and Prokofiev exchanged an extensive professional and increasingly personal correspondence for over twenty years. The chapter is based on unique materials, including his memoirs, given to the author by Atovmian’s daughter. It explores their correspondence, and reveals the circumstances surrounding the discovery of Atovmian’s arrangement of an oratorio based on Prokofiev’s music for Ivan the Terrible.

“Monsieur Prokofieff”

Composers’ national identities, as we perceive them, tend to act as a constraint on the type of questions we ask about them. Prokofiev research is a clear example of this, since it has been focused either on his early years or on his return to Soviet Russia. His two decades abroad have usually been treated as transitional, unsettled, and of limited significance. This chapter reimagines Prokofiev in Paris, not as a fleeting Russian émigré but as a fixture in Parisian musical life. It assesses both how important Prokofiev was for Paris and how important Paris was for Prokofiev. The materials for this task are now abundant: Prokofiev’s own diaries and much of his personal and professional correspondence have been published; and a multitude of French press reviews are available online. The impact of the Paris years well into Prokofiev’s Soviet period is also examined—an influence not generally recognized by either Soviet or Western commentators.