Sergei Prokofiev

Russian composer

• Born: April 23, 1891
• Birthplace: Sontsovka, Ukraine, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine)
• Died: March 5, 1953
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Prokofiev was one of the two most successful Soviet composers of the twentieth century; he also ranks with the half dozen leading composers of the century. Although he first gained notice as an extraordinary pianist, he eventually created masterpieces in most major musical forms. In particular, in Peter and the Wolf, Alexander Nevsky, and Romeo and Juliet, he wrote three of the most celebrated works of his time.

Early Life

Sergei Prokofiev (syihr-GYAY prah-KAW-fee-ehf) was born on an isolated estate in the remote Ukraine, where his father managed agricultural production. Born to his parents after fourteen years of marriage and two earlier failed pregnancies, Prokofiev experienced both the advantages and the disadvantages of an only and long-desired child. He enjoyed much attention, stimulating his creativity; he was treated overindulgently, which made him self-centered and demanding. Because of the remoteness of the area, all of his early education was at home, supplemented by summer excursions to Moscow and especially St. Petersburg, his mother’s family home, one marked by intellectual upward striving. An enthusiastic amateur pianist herself she played regularly for her unborn child she was overjoyed when her five-year-old son said that he wanted to learn the piano. Shortly thereafter he declared that he wanted to write his own music; he proceeded to do so, inventing his own notation in the process. Yet, although his family encouraged this musical precocity, his father insisted that he acquire a rigorous standard academic background. At nine, his parents took him to his first opera; he returned home to write and stage his own opera, with neighbor children and servants taking the roles. The following year he was introduced to the head of the Moscow Conservatory, who recommended that a professional tutor be hired to teach him the fundamentals of composition and theory.

At considerable sacrifice, his parents decided to follow this advice. For two summers, beginning in 1902, they hired the young composer Reinhold Gliere, who proved the perfect mentor for a talented child for whom music was both a complex mathematical game and the basis of a spectacle. At the same time, his father continued to insist on his general education. His mother, however, determined that he was destined for music; from this point she managed his education so that he would qualify for admission to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the most prestigious in the country, at the earliest possible moment. He took the examinations in August, 1904, and was admitted at the age of thirteen. He would remain there for ten years, though he would gain his first degree in 1911.

As a student, Prokofiev was both precocious and obnoxious; he early formed the habit of doing his exercise compositions the way his professors insisted he do them, while working on his own compositions in private. Entering the conservatory as a prodigy of sorts did little for his social development; in fact, for a while it intensified his obstinacy and irritability, since he felt different from everyone else. Still, Prokofiev grew up at the conservatory, both socially and musically. Socially, he passed through adolescence there, developing a fondness for women, with whom he always got along better than men. Musically, he was instructed by Aleksandr Glazunov, Nikolai Tcherepnin, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, among others. He largely ignored them, however, concentrating more on developing a reputation as a spoiled prodigy. Within four years, he was performing his own compositions in conservatory and city concert series. He became a sensation; no other conservatory student gained public notice at such an early age. His remaining years as a student saw him building on his early successes. When he left in 1914, he was ready to step into the front ranks of performers and composers.

Life’s Work

Before Prokofiev left the conservatory at the age of twenty-three, he had already begun his career as a published composer and had gained a national reputation as a performer. His list of compositions was already impressive: He had before graduation completed a number of piano pieces, including a set of études and three sonatas; two chamber works; a fairy tale for voice and piano; two sets of songs; a sinfonietta; two symphonic sketches; two piano concerti; and an opera. Not all of these saw publication, but the list is intimidating and ambitious. Yet at that point his celebrity was primarily as a performer. He had premiered both of his piano concerti in Moscow and St. Petersburg, causing a sensation with each appearance. These were the most controversial entrances onto the Russian musical scene of the period; single-handedly they catapulted Russian music into the twentieth century. To be sure, he was following the lead of Igor Stravinsky, who had caused a riot with the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1912; that was in Paris, however, and besides Stravinsky had turned his back on Russia. Prokofiev brought the modernist revolution to Russia.

During the four years following the years of the outbreak first of World War I and then of the Russian revolutions Prokofiev consolidated his position. Just prior to the beginning of hostilities, Prokofiev toured Europe, in the course of which he met Sergei Diaghilev, the famous impresario of the Ballets Russes and the primary vector of the modernist movement in Paris; he also introduced both his performance technique and his music to Europe. After hearing the Paris premiere of the second piano concerto, Diaghilev commissioned a ballet score from the young composer. Prokofiev completed a version within a year, but it proved unsatisfactory, whereupon Diaghilev commissioned another. This became The Buffoon, which he finished quickly. Simultaneously he developed the Scythian Suite out of the rejected ballet, and this was a triumph. He also finished a second opera, The Gambler, based on a Fyodor Dostoevski novel but unproduced until 1929; a first symphony, the Classical, a sensation then and popular ever since; a first violin concerto, another success; two more piano sonatas; two sets of songs; and a cantata. Yet making a living through music in war- and revolution-afflicted Russia was dubious at best, and in 1918 Prokofiev decided to leave for the West. His visit intended at first to last only a few months extended in the end to seventeen years.

Those years constitute Prokofiev’s middle period, during which he gradually shed his bad-boy image and established his position as one of the world’s leading composers. During that period, he tried living in a variety of places before finally settling on Paris. Before leaving Russia he had introduced his Classical symphony (no. 1), modeled on his notion of what Joseph Haydn might have done with the harmonic modifications of the twentieth century. Because of the turmoil in Europe, he traveled across Siberia, itself in disarray because of the revolution; from Japan, where he concertized to replenish his finances, he sailed to the United States. He spent most of the following three and a half years in that country, performing often, introducing his works as he composed them, but getting mixed responses regularly cool in New York and hot in Chicago. He also traveled to the Continent, where he renewed connections with Diaghilev. The major achievements of his American years were the opera Love for Three Oranges , which is still performed and from which a more popular suite was extracted; the ballet The Buffoon; and the Third Piano Concerto.

From 1922 to late 1935, Prokofiev lived in Europe, for two years in Austria and then semipermanently in Paris. In 1923, he married Lina Codina, a young American singer of Cuban, Spanish, and Polish background whom he had met in New York in 1918 and with whom he had often performed. The couple had two sons, both born in Paris, Sviatislav in 1924 and Oleg in 1928. Although the strain of supporting a family which in those days included relatives at first proved difficult, these years witnessed a series of successes, which confirmed Prokofiev’s eminence. In 1927, he returned to the Soviet Union for the first time in nine years, tentatively attempting to repair connections, but the financial attractions of the West still proved too tempting. Thereafter he would return to Russia regularly. Yet for the next several years, his triumphs occurred in the West, which saw several major works premiered: the ballets Le Pas d’acier (1927), The Prodigal Son (1929), and On the Dnepr (1932); the opera The Gambler (1929); the film score for Lt. Kije (1933), which also furnished material for a popular suite and which introduced Prokofiev to the medium of film composition; the Fourth Symphony (1930); two piano concerti (1931 and 1932); the Second Violin Concerto (1935); and a profusion of chamber, solo instrument, and vocal works.

By 1935, Prokofiev had decided that his future lay in returning to the Soviet Union. The Depression (1929-1941), while limiting opportunities in the West, had had little effect on the Soviet economy, and Prokofiev had begun to believe that his soul was rooted in Russia. This return inaugurated his Soviet period (1935-1953), the years of his greatest achievements as well as his greatest humiliations. He returned just as Joseph Stalin began putting into practice his program for turning artists into propaganda-mongers. For musicians as for others this meant subordinating creative impulses to socially and politically acceptable work. At first Prokofiev fit smoothly into this regimen. He had always worked well in response to specific directions, and the commissars required much work to order. His first years were extraordinarily productive: He completed the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1937) and the three suites drawn from it; Peter and the Wolf (1938), a children’s fable for narrator and orchestra; film scores for Queen of Spades (1938) and Alexander Nevsky (1939), the latter also developed into a cantata; and his First Cello Concerto (1939).

These were also the years immediately preceding World War II, years of intensifying tension and suspicion. Some of this fell on Prokofiev because of his long absence from the country during its formative years. As a result, he experienced some negative criticism, hostile reactions he did not expect in his homeland. The outbreak of war affected him both professionally and personally. Like most Soviet artists, Prokofiev was expected to produce works that would help rally the Soviet people. Seizing the opportunity, Prokofiev chose the classic text for an opera aimed at that end, Leo Tolstoy’s Voyna i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace, 1886), although it was not produced until 1946. He also composed a number of classic film scores, most notably that for Sergei Eisenstein’s monumental Ivan Grozny (1944-1946; Ivan the Terrible). With Russian success in the war, he returned to the ballet score Cinderella (1945), another wonderful work. The premiere of his epic Fifth Symphony was appropriately symbolic; its performance was delayed by cannon salvos signaling the beginning of Russia’s final victorious offensive of the war.

The war also brought the dissolution of his first marriage and his liaison with and eventual marriage to Mira Mendelson. His remarriage in 1948 accompanied significant changes: He was humiliated before and censured by a congress of Soviet composers as part of Stalin’s program to establish absolute rule. Simultaneously his first wife, Russian only by naturalization, was sentenced to hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for supposed disloyalty. His health broke in this crisis; the last five years showed a lingering decline. He continued composing to the end; though his final works are not among his finest, they do include the bold Sinfonia Concertante for Cello and Orchestra (1948); the broad and affirmative Sixth Symphony (1949); the Cello Sonata, his most accessible chamber work; and the somewhat less effective Seventh Symphony (1950). Broken by hypertension and high blood pressure, hounded by the attacks of ideological commissars, Prokofiev died in Moscow on March 5, 1953, at very nearly the same time that his prosecutor, Stalin, died.

Significance

By all accounts one of the most brilliant and successful composers of the twentieth century, is in some respects more remarkable because of his interaction with Russian culture and the evolving Soviet state. His cultural heredity determined the orientation of his music and shaped his life. His most popular and enduring works grow out of and reflect the Russian soul: historically in Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, folkloristically in Peter and the Wolf, artistically in Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, narratively in Lt. Kije and War and Peace. He is the prototypical iconoclastic Russian artist, shattering idols in an orgy of self-expression yet reserving his best work for command performances and made-to-order scores. Throughout his life he remained Russian, returning home at a hard time because he believed it was home and expending his energies in really trying to express the Russian soul in his music.

Some critics have contended that Prokofiev’s return to the Soviet Union and voluntary submission to creative controls stunted his creative growth and limited the music he could have composed. Throughout his career, however, Prokofiev did his best work in response to strict directions. Probably for this reason he is indisputably the master film-score composer; no other craftsman proved more adept at creating the perfect aural analogue for a visual image. Similarly, no other attempt at creating a musical illustration for a fable has succeeded like Peter and the Wolf, which has entered the common consciousness as few classical compositions have. Undoubtedly Prokofiev suffered from the strictures clamped on him, but what he achieved is unprecedented and will endure.

Bibliography

Krebs, Stanley Dale. Soviet Composers and the Growth of Soviet Music. London: Allen & Unwin, 1970. This is the best general account of the impact of socialist ideology on Russian composers up to 1960. Quite useful because it sets Prokofiev squarely in his cultural context, this work offers interesting comparisons of Prokofiev with other composers. The book perhaps overstresses the negative aspects of Stalinism.

Nestyev, Israel. Prokofiev. Translated by Florence Jonas. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1960. An authorized Soviet biography with full apparatus, this work presents much detailed information through the distorting lens of ideological preconception. Nestyev’s basic view is that Prokofiev’s music was perverted by his stay in the West.

Nice, David. Prokofiev: From Russia to the West, 1891-1935. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. In the first of a projected two-volume biography, Nice examines Prokofiev’s childhood in Russia, studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and life in other European countries and the United States. The book ends with an explanation of his decision to return to the Soviet Union with his family.

Robinson, Harlow. Sergei Prokofiev. New York: Viking, 1987. This book is the single indispensable work on the composer, a complete and evenhanded scholarly biography with full critical materials, including an annotated bibliography. Robinson presents all the information available with clarity and grace, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.

Samuel, Claude. Prokofiev. Translated by Miriam John. London: Calder and Boyars, 1971. A readable and well-focused biography, this book is particularly useful for the general reader. It is, however, colored by a pro-Western bias and is somewhat limited in technical musical information.

Savkina, Natalia. Prokofiev. Translated by Catherine Young. Neptune City, N.J.: Paganiniana, 1984. A translation of an authorized Soviet biography of 1982, this presents a revisionist Soviet view of the composer and his sufferings under Stalin. More objective and pictorial than Nestyev, this account is slighter and less substantial, and still exhibits a pro-Russian bias.

Seroff, Victor. Sergei Prokofiev: A Soviet Tragedy. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968. As the title indicates, this book is less objective biography than the Western entry in an ideological conflict. It is well written, however, and contains some good illustrations.

Thomson, Andrew. “Salad Days.” Musical Times 148, no. 1898 (Spring, 2007): 99-106. Profile examining Prokofiev’s life and works.