A Single-Minded Man

If one were to strip Sergei Prokofiev of his music and consider the rest of his life, there would not be much left. Like millions of his compatriots, he was an ordinary man, not a fighter. Closing his eyes to the brutal totalitarian dictatorship of the Soviet regime, he accommodated its political demands and stuck to his sole passion in life: music. In fact, we could put him down for his aloofness even to the point of calling him a self-centered egotist, especially in his youth.

The young Prokofiev had a lot of gall. While 25, he wrote his First Symphony, and called it “Classical.” The meaning was two-fold: the symphony imitated “Papa Haydn,” and therefore could be called “Classical,” because of its use of the classical model. But there was also the second meaning, as Prokofiev himself later confessed: he was hoping that the symphony would become a “classic.”

Remarkably, it did, his chutzpah notwithstanding (or maybe because of it).

Paradoxically, Sergey Sergeyevich  mellowed with age, and became an almost tolerable, even lovable, human being once he hit fifty or so.

This was a fitting conclusion to a life that was filled with paradoxes: he began life as a rebel and finished it as a near academic; while others tried to escape from Russia, he voluntarily repatriated there, straight into Stalin’s clutches. As Fate would have it, Prokofiev died on the same day as the Great Dictator.

Prokofiev always had more luck with listeners than with critics. One of them (a distinguished Russian critic) wrote a bad review of a concert that never took place; another (a distinguished American critic) advised the first American female performer of the Seventh Sonata to play something American instead; yet another American academic recently consigned Prokofiev to the dustbin of history, for his alleged political and musical sins.

As it is turning out, the dustbins of history are being readied for the academics. Prokofiev’s music, on the other hand, shows no sign of losing its appeal, and his best works occupy a permanent place in the classical repertoire. They are simply beyond argument now, just as Beethoven or Mozart are beyond argument. (Try imagining classical music without Peter and the Wolf, the March from The Love for Three Oranges, or the piano sonatas.)

Prokofiev died fifty years ago this spring.

HIS LIFE

But first, he was born. In the Ukraine, on a farm. (He later paid homage to the wondrous Ukrainian summer nights in his great Soviet opera, Semyon Kotko.) He had a happily uneventful childhood, brought up by loving parents who spoiled him rotten. His musician mother recognized his gifts and spared no expense to give him the best education money could buy.

His parents’ money bought him a live-in tutor—Reinhold Gliére (then only twenty-seven, and a recent graduate of the Moscow Conservatory; Prokofiev was eleven). Known today chiefly for the “Sailors’ Dance” from his ballet The Red Poppy, Gliére was a superbly knowledgeable technician, and a nice fellow to boot. He got along well with the young prodigy, was accepted in the family, and gave Prokofiev solid foundations of compositional craft. (Despite being some sixteen years his senior, Gliére outlived his student by three years.)

Prokofiev then studied composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, under the disapproving eyes of two living classics of Russian music, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov. He also studied piano with Anna Yesipova, who could not tolerate the music of Medtner (a much more conservative fellow), much less Prokofiev. She, however, made him into a piano virtuoso, which allowed him to make a living during his years abroad. Prokofiev’s recording of his own Third Piano Concerto reveals an astonishing synthesis of styles—the biting modernism and sarcasm of the music, coupled with  the most romantic style of performance.

After the Revolution, Prokofiev spent a decade and a half abroad, and, in the mid-thirties, returned to Russia. Bad timing! Soon he could not go abroad with his family (kept as hostages to assure his return), and his marriage broke up (eventually his foreign-born wife was arrested and sent to the camps). Hardships suffered during the War, political persecution after the War, and generally declining health took their toll, and Prokofiev died in 1953, only sixty-two years old.

HIS WORKS

Prokofiev’s music is very uneven. Interestingly, the ups and downs seem to be correlated with the periods of his life, and, even more specifically, with the countries of his residence.

To put it bluntly, he wrote his best works when he was living in Russia. His early works, written before the Revolution, are, in a sense, typical: every young composer who tries to stake out his or her place in the musical universe goes for scandal, shock, affront. Thus, Richard Strauss includes a striptease in an early opera—a far cry from the autumnal and serene masterpieces he wrote in his seventies! Prokofiev was no exception—except, instead of sex, he went for violence.

The works from his foreign period lose some of the raw power of his early works, and become more cerebral and less affecting. That is not to say they are uniformly bad—Prokofiev is still Prokofiev—but works like the Fourth Symphony probably mark the nadir of his compositional career.

The break roughly coincides with his permanent return to Russia in 1936. Peter and the Wolf dates from the that year, and exhibits Prokofiev’s mature style, which synthesizes the harmonic inventiveness of his early works, the crafty experimentation of the foreign period, and the permeating lyricism that, as it turned out, had always been there.

It is, however, during the two Great Wars (one by Stalin against the Soviet people and another by Hitler against the Soviet people) that Prokofiev composed his arguably greatest works.

It is interesting to contemplate that, generally, artists seem to require a solid dose of adversity or, even better, suffering, to create truly great works. For example, Mendelssohn (whose life was mainly uneventful) was undoubtedly a near-great composer, but he never wrote gut-wrenching masterpieces that leave us in a state of catharsis. He best excelled in describing flying elves. On the other hand, some works of Brahms or Mahler could leave us shattered.

The same with Prokofiev. His foreign works, while inventive and imaginative, leave one detached, a disinterested observer. His first works upon his return to Russia—such as the occasional work Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of October—leave one impressed, but primarily on the intellectual level. Shortly, however, Prokofiev was producing sublime masterpieces that spoke the language of universal compassion—the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, works of genuine patriotic sentiment (eminently justified during the time of the greatest slaughter humanity ever experienced)—Fifth  Symphony and War and Peace, or instrumental works that presented the epic struggle of good and evil—Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7, and 8. It is not coincidental that these works come from either the late 1930s, the time of the internal slaughter, or the 1940s, the time of the external slaughter.

IMMORTALITY

What, then, to make of Prokofiev? First, the obvious. The 20th century in music was a time of struggle, just as in real life. That musical struggle was no less brutal than the struggle in real life, and people got killed in it just the same. As one of the satirists of the Soviet era mused, “Composers wrote denunciations of each other on music paper” (from the notebooks of Ilya Il’f).

The struggle in 20th century music was . . . well, to borrow the immortal phrase from the infamous decree of the Central Committee, “between formalism and realism in music.” Of course, formalism and realism are in the eye of the beholder, but, in retrospect, the commissars did detect a problem, albeit they failed to identify it correctly. The struggle actually was between music tonal and a-tonal.

Tonal music is music that has an ascertainable key—that is, it is grounded in a particular note of a scale that serves as the ultimate resting point. A musical key is a concept that connotes consonance, stability. Tonal music, while it may have a lot of dissonances, ultimately is based on consonant harmony.

Atonal music is everything but. It avoids consonance; it has no resting points; it avoids harmony; instead of concerning itself with vertical sonorities (chords, which may be dissonant or consonant) it mostly concerns itself with linear movement of voices, often with little regard to how their combinations actually sound.

There was a time when atonal music was thought to be the answer, especially in the West. No more. Audiences rejected it, performers rejected it, and new generations of composers rejected it.

Prokofiev’s music was the bulwark against atonality. Despite the (sometimes) extreme complexity of its harmony, it is tonal, tonal, tonal. Often “C-major” tonal, proving that lots of new ideas may be expressed in a key based just on the white notes of a piano keyboard.

Next, all this would have been very interesting—to a musicologist—had it not been for the widespread popularity of Prokofiev’s music. Sure, not as widespread as “The Grateful Dead,” but, by its nature, Prokofiev’s music requires a musically educated audience. Among the audiences that listen to what we may call, for lack of a better term, “classical” music, Prokofiev is indisputably one of the greatest representatives of “modern classical” music. Despite its novelty and occasional complexity, his music is actually understood by regular concert-goers, and sometimes even by children. (One of the most fascinating examples of Prokofiev’s mastery of modern compositional style is his Album for Children, in which he writes little piano pieces suitable for a student, and yet unmistakably “Prokofiev” in style. Peter and the Wolf also comes to mind—it is a sign of true popular acceptance when the role of the Grandfather is given to Big Bird.)

Then there is quality and content. It is difficult to talk about “content” in music, which, after all, is an abstract art. Yet, both professionals and amateurs are able to perceive that there are certain musical works so striking, so affecting, that they stand apart from the rest of the great works as supreme, towering masterpieces. Beethoven’s Fifth, for example. Or Beethoven’s Ninth. Or Beethoven’s Appassionata.

It is my firm belief (and I played the complete cycle of Prokofiev piano-solo works, and am familiar with most of his orchestral music) that some of Prokofiev’s works belong to this rare category. Romeo and Juliet, the Fifth Symphony, and the great trilogy of piano sonatas (6th, 7th, and 8th) do. Others listeners probably will add to this list—good candidates would be the First Violin Concerto, Third Piano Concerto, First Sonata for Violin and Piano, War and Peace, the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, and Alexander Nevsky (see Russian Life, Nov/Dec 2002, for Pavel Korin’s depiction of this medieval Russian hero). It is safe to predict that, as long as there are concerts of classical music, Prokofiev will always appear alongside Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.

Finally, one cannot fail to mention the “Hollywood connection.” The legacy of Prokofiev is plainly obvious there. John Williams is undoubtedly a composer of great talent, and the following is not intended to diminish his stature in any way. However, one should forthrightly acknowledge that the style of his music comes directly from Prokofiev. Thus, as long as Star Wars remains available on DVD, Prokofiev’s legacy will live.   RL