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Sergei Prokofiev 1891–1953

by M. Montagu-Nathan

In addressing the subject of composers who have worked under the Soviet dispensation since the earlier ‘thirties, one is confronted with a dilemma that historians of the arts have never before been obliged to face. It is now becoming widely known that Russian composers have for many years been constantly irked by a vexatious interference emanating from a high political level. Its origin appears to be based upon the egregious Tolstoyan principle that art of every kind should appeal, even on a first experience, to the untutored. This has been brought in its train, especially in more recent times, an obligation to write music that will conform to a style likely to conflict with the composer’s artistic convictions. In certain instances Soviet composers have attempted to make the best of two worlds by endeavouring, as it were, to soften the blow – writing music in which they really express themselves, and compromising with the political obligation by smearing it over with a coating of material calculated to satisfy those who believe that what appeals to them personally will appeal in the same measure to the masses.

This intrusion of an ‘official’ viewpoint has applied not only to the quality of music but to its type. Just as the authorities have discountenanced what they call ‘easel pictures’ (formal portraiture and the like) and have insisted that painters confine themselves to propagandist subjects, so it has been insisted that symphonies must eventually be superseded by choral works containing a goodly proportion of folk material. This has resulted in a marked deterioration in quality, for the latter type of work has fallen into the hands of composers whose technical equipment is distinctly below the level required for the composition of symphonic material. As an eloquent example of subterfuge to which Soviet composers have been driven to resort nothing could be more striking than what Prof. Gerald Abraham describes as ‘harmonic contraband disguised as pictorialism for children’: there are things in Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’, he continues, ‘that would have been condemned out of hand by orthodox Soviet critics as senseless modernism and "formalism" if they had not been passed off as illustrations of Petya lassoing the wolf by its tail or the wolf stalking the duck’. It need hardly be emphasized that had this device failed to deceive the upholders of orthodoxy, Prokofiev would have been sternly rebuked and informed that he must ‘think again’.

It will be understood, therefore, that when appraising the output of even the most distinguished of Soviet composers – a description which may safely be applied to Prokofiev – it is always extremely difficult to determine how much of his music is really representative of himself, and how much has been imposed upon him by the considerations to which reference has been made. In discussing the work of Prokofiev, appraisal is fraught with yet greater complexity, for during the interim between his departure from Russia and his return to his native land in 1934 he was in a position to please himself. It is an exercise of considerable interest to discover at what point and in what particular composition lies the line of demarcation between, so to speak, the free and the bond; it is by no means unlikely that the influence of his sojourns in Western Europe and North America was not easily thrown off of his return to Russia. For this reason it would seem advisable on the part of musicologists writing on the subject of Prokofiev to take the precaution of notifying readers that certain critical observations may on occasion be taken with reserve.

Few will dispute that Prokofiev was the most important and the most versatile of modern Russian composers. There is, indeed, no sphere of musical composition which he did not enter with success. In my book ‘Contemporary Russian Composers’ (1917) he was already described, when only twenty-six years of age, as the most discussed Russian musician of the day. He was then regarded as the enfant terrible of the Petrograd musical world, and one of the outstanding pages in the history of modern Russian music records that during the first performance of his ‘Scythian Suite’ the conservative Glazunov ostentatiously left the hall. Dr. Percy A. Scholes provides the next chapter – one redounding to the credit of a London audience. Writing in a Sunday newspaper on 31 October 1920 he reported the remark of a musical friend in respect of the London Symphony Orchestra’s coming performance (under Albert Coates) of this same Scythian Suite: ‘It will be another hissing concert’. The said musical friend here and now admits that his forecast proved erroneous. And it is now established that the former ‘young barbarian’ was destined to develop into a composer commanding sufficient respect to be considered a worthy recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s gold medal. ‘Such’, wrote Nicolas Nabokov in an article on Prokofiev in the Russian magazine Chisla (1930), ‘is the course of events so repeatedly recorded in the history of the musical art’.

Born on 23 April 1891, Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev began his first creative essay at the age of twelve when he chose as the text of an opera Pushkin’s ‘A Feast in Plague-time’ (derived from Christopher North, of the ‘Noctes ambrosianae’). Only one act of this juvenile effort was completed. Its title and subject can hardly have led anyone to expect that its youthful composer was destined to be described as an ‘irrepressible jester’, and it would be difficult to guess which of his teachers, Glière, Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, Essipova (piano), and Tcherepnin (conducting), inspired him to adopt such a vein. Nor do any of them seem likely to have directed the thoughts of their young pupil towards an aggressive type of modernistic music. It seems much more probable that the influence chiefly responsible for this trend was Prokofiev’s friendship with the poet Mayakovsky (1894-1930), to whom Gleb Struve attributes ‘the real driving force’ behind Futurism, expressed in terms of biting satire. For a considerable time Prokofiev was known outside Russia only as a jester – a reputation for which his ballet ‘Shut’ (The Buffoon) and his opera ‘The Love of Three Oranges’ were responsible. Later on such works as his Classical Symphony proved him capable of adhering to more-or-less orthodox methods without indulging in plagiarism, and of imposing on this music the imprint of his own personality.

During his absence from Russia (from 1918 to 1934) he composed some twenty works, of which the fifth piano concerto was apparently the last. It is tolerably clear that Prokofiev during that interim experienced the sensation of Antaeus when lifted by Hercules from the earth. Nostalgia was obviously the cause of his desire to return to the motherland. Subject as he undoubtedly was to Western influences, he had earlier proved himself to be fundamentally a true Russian – in the same sense as Mussorgsky, with whom he had a great deal in common. It was probably this circumstance which impelled him to visit Russia at the beginning of 1927, but it was not until seven years later that he finally resolved to return home. He expressed the belief that those of his compatriots who had permanently settled abroad were becoming foreigners in the artistic sense.

But soon after his return the demand for what the authorities chose to term ‘Soviet realism’ began to irk him. As recorded by Alexander Werth (‘Musical Uproar in Moscow’, 1949), there were repeated warnings from Pravda, and a crisis was reached in 1947 when the sixth symphony was condemned as excessively ‘formalistic’. A year later Zhdanov, whose death has lately again come into the news, addressed a conference of musicians at which he made it perfectly clear that composers who refused to toe the line indicated through him by higher authority would be called to order. Prokofiev was not present at the conference, but it is generally believed that he was affected by this monstrous edict more than any of his many colleagues who attended it. There can be little doubt that the limitations thus imposed upon him proved disastrous to his further development; and from all accounts he must have died on 4 March 1953 a frustrated composer and a disappointed man.

Musical Times, May 1953