Sergey Prokofiev, born in the Ukraine on April 23, 1891, was one of Russia’s greatest composers. In the hostile intellectual climate of post-revolutionary Russia, he was seen as very much a rebel. The Soviet government criticised him for being too abstract and unintelligible, and exhorted him to write for the “common man” instead of the musical élite. Ironically however, his music is now seen as technically conservative in the West, especially when compared to the innovations of composers such as STRAVINSKY, IVES, and SCHOENBERG.
Innovation, though, is not the only indication of creative genius. Prokofiev’s works for the stage are exciting and genuinely theatrical, and he made major contributions in all the main musical genres. With great intellectual and emotional intensity, he made use of the musical tools available to him at the end of a musical era.
Prokofiev should be thought of as the capstone of an era rather than as an innovator and it is the quality of his music, rather than its newness, that demands our attention and admiration.
Prokofiev was born into a middle-class family. His mother was an amateur pianist, and the young Prokofiev started composing piano pieces when he was five. His output, even as a child, was prodigious. Although his parents were worried about his being committed to a musical career so young, he was enrolled at the conservatory in St. Petersburg in 1904, when he was only 13. He stayed there until 1914, studying orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov and counterpoint with Lyadov, although he did not form a strong bond with either teacher and got a reputation for being an impatient and rebellious youth. His first public appearance was in 1908, with a performance of his piano piece, Suggestion diabolique, which was declared to be unintelligible and “ultramodern.” During this time he came to admire the works of Richard STRAUSS and SCRIABIN, and was introduced to the early works of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In 1910 Prokofiev’s father died, and with him, the family’s income disappeared. It became clear to the young composer that he had to earn a living from his music. In his last year at the conservatory, he set himself the goal of winning the Rubinstein Prize for piano-playing, and did so with a performance of his own Piano Concerto No. 1. Besides this, his most important music of the period includes the Toccata for piano (1912), the Scythian Suite for orchestra (1915), the first Violin Concerto No. 1 (1917), and the Classical Symphony (1917).
On graduating from the conservatory, Prokofiev made a trip to London and met the ballet impresario Sergey Diaghilev, who was sufficiently impressed by Prokofiev’s playing of his Piano Concerto No. 2 to commission a ballet. This contact did not bear fruit until later in the 1920s, but it fired Prokofiev’s interest in ballet and the stage. His early works already showed signs of his mature musical language—one with imaginative orchestration, driving dance-like rhythms, rhythmic ostinatos (repetition of a musical phrase constantly throughout a passage), lyrical melodies, and frequent half-step modulations. The pounding rhythms and screaming sounds of the Scythian Suite (partly inspired by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring), the Piano Concerto No. 2, and the ballets Chout (1921) and Steel Step help explain why his early audiences considered Prokofiev a shocking radical. But even in his most radical works, Prokofiev’s music was almost always tonal, a characteristic of his style that enabled his music to win wide popular acceptance.
In the mid-1910s, Russia was in a state of political ferment. During Prokofiev’s time at the conservatory, teachers were dismissed for political dissidence and the conservatory was closed for a period. Then came World War I and the Russian Revolution, which reduced the country to a state of civil war. Musical life became impossible, and Prokofiev decided to leave for the United States.
Prokofiev left Russia for America in 1918, and he remained there until 1920. During the voyage, he began his popular opera, The Love for Three Oranges (1919). However, this proved to be a mixed blessing at the time. The Chicago Opera offered to stage the work but the conductor died; the work was postponed and the composer lost much time during which he could have promoted his piano works. He did, however, complete his third piano concerto and began another opera, The Fiery Angel.
Prokofiev left the U.S. for France in 1920, staying there until 1936. In 1923 he married the Spanish singer Lina Llubera and settled in Paris. Here, he again met Diaghilev, who commissioned a ballet on a Soviet theme. He wanted the rawness of the newly industrialised country to be reflected in an exciting ballet. Prokofiev’s response, The Steel Step (1925–26), was successful in Paris and London, although it was rejected by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians as too esoteric. Diaghilev then commissioned The Prodigal Son (1928–29), a ballet based on the Biblical story, which was also enthusiastically received, but Diaghilev himself became ill and died in 1929. Several other important works emerged during this period: important revisions of his operas The Fiery Angel (1927) and The Gambler (1927–28), the Symphony No. 3 (1928), the Piano Concerto No. 4 (I93I), for the left hand alone, and the Violin Concerto No. 2 (1935).
Prokofiev returned to Russia (now the U.S.S.R.) in 1936, and remained there until his death in 1953— ironically he died on exactly the same day as the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Prokofiev had toured the U.S.S.R. in 1927 with considerable success, being treated as a celebrity, and returned for a visit in 1929, when an injury from a car accident prevented him performing. In 1933, the Russian film director Feinzimmer commissioned a score for his film Lieutenant Kijé, which remains one of Prokofiev’s most popular light-hearted pieces. However, when he actually returned home as a citizen, he began to feel the effects of Soviet censorship. The Soviet government felt that any art not created for the people as a whole was meaningless, and they placed severe restrictions on all Russian artists and banned the work of European composers they considered decadent. Prokofiev responded by trying to write pieces o n suitable Soviet themes of the time, but was at his happiest during these remaining years when composing works based on more traditional themes, such as the children’s tale Peter and the Wolf (1956) and the opera War and Peace. In spite of continuing difficulties with government officials, he was still able to produce some of his finest work, including the ballets Romeo and Juliet (1935–36) and Cinderella (1940–44), and his Symphony No. 5 (1944).
Prokofiev died in Moscow o n March 5, 1953, from a brain haemorrhage. Because of the troubled times through which he lived, a number of Prokofiev’s works are lost in obscurity. Nevertheless, he is deservedly one of the most popular 20th-century composers, and many of his major works are firmly established in the standard repertoire of soloists, conductors, and ballet and opera companies.
Richard Trombley
SEE ALSO:
CHAMBER MUSIC; OPERA; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Minturn, Neil. The Music of Sergei Prokofiev (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997);
Samuel, Claude. Prokofiev (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1998).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Alexander Nevsky; Classical Symphony; The Love for Three Oranges; Peter and the Wolf; Piano Concerto No. 3; Romeo and Juliet; String Quartet Nos. 1 and 2; Symphony No. 5.
