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by Robert Cummings
Sergei Sergeievich Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in the village of Sontsovka in the Donets region of Ukraine to a well-to-do family of agriculturalists. He was a child prodigy on the order of Mozart, composing for piano at age five and writing an opera at nine. His first teacher was his mother, a quite talented amateur pianist. Prokofiev entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory as a cocky teenager, only too willing to startle his teachers, Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov among others, with his brazen compositions, which already showed advanced, if not yet entirely original, harmonies and thematic ideas.
He spent his early years in his homeland, but in 1917 departed the newly established Soviet Union for a sojourn that would take him to Japan, the United States and Europe. He eventually settled in France and lived most of his self-imposed seventeen-year exile there. In 1934 he returned to the Soviet Union where he officially resettled two years later. He would die in 1953 there, having written more compositions for the standard repertoire than any other twentieth-century composer.
The music of Prokofiev has been categorized variously as neoclassical, eclectic, post-romantic, nationalistic, anti-romantic, and even cosmopolitan. The emotional expression of his compositions has been ascribed a host of adjectives no less wide-ranging: cold, sarcastic, innocent, savage, lyrical, motoric and epic. There would seem many incompatibilties in these descriptions, yet Prokofiev was all of these things.
In his Ten Pieces For Children and Peter And The Wolf he is innocent, if a bit cutely sardonic. Alexander Nevsky and The Russian Overture show him nationalistic and grandly epic, while The Scythian Suite and Symphony No. 2 reveal his brashness and savagery. His greatest ballets, Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella find him warm and lyrical and, in the case of the former, also profoundly tragic. Other works like the Classical Symphony (elegant and witty), Symphony No. 6 (dark and tragic), Piano Sonata No. 6 (defiantly triumphant), The Fiery Angel (otherwordly), and the Toccata for piano (brilliant and motoric) serve to further bolster the view that he was protean, unclassifiable. Yet, in all these works there is woven a subtle thread from a single unique voice, a voice with a recognizable stamp that could only belong to Prokofiev.
So how was Prokofiev able to wear so many musical hats? Perhaps the answer in great part is that he possessed an unquenchable thirst for writing in multiple musical genres: opera, ballet, film scores, concertos and sonatas for various instruments and combinations of instruments, symphonies, children's music, songs, choruses, quartets, orchestral suites (derived from ballets and operas), marches for military band, and there is even a composition for four bassoons! No other composer comes to mind from any period who was as versatile.
And Prokofiev managed to attain artistic success in his versatility, incredibly having written masterpieces in each of these genres. Surely no other twentieth-century composer could make such a claim. Moreover, few, if any, could rival Prokofiev in writing popular melodies. The March from The Love For Three Oranges served as the theme for the long-running radio show "Your FBI In Peace And War"; the Troika from Lt. Kije has been turned into a popular Christmas song; Peter's theme from Peter and The Wolf, as well as the Cat's theme (getting considerable play from a recent TV cat food commercial), are familiar the world over; the music depicting the conflict between Montagues and Capulets from Romeo And Juliet is well known from more than one commercial incarnation; and other melodies, like that which closes War And Peace or the giddily genteel tune from the Classical Symphony's Gavotte are hummed by the man and woman on the street, even if they don't know the author's name.
But beneath this veneer of prolificacy and thematic facility was a composer who could write music born of pain and suffering, like the Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano and Symphony No. 6. These are wartime works whose emotional springboard may have more to do with anti-Stalinism than with the war. Prokofiev's wife had been arrested and sent to a labor camp, while he remained free--free to suffer the oppression and constant mischief of Stalin and his henchmen, chief among whom in the arts was Andrei Zhdanov. While Prokofiev and other composers (Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Miaskovsky) had ostensibly conformed to many of the musical demands of the state with conservative celebratory and occasional pieces, mostly of lesser quality than their usual work, their resentment and outrage often surfaced in other compositions. One can correctly surmise that in these two dark works, as well as in the trilogy of "War Sonatas," Nos. 6-8, Prokofiev was clearly venting his anger and frustration with the Soviet regime.
In his tragic last years, despite the dire political situation and increasingly poor health (his compositional activity had been limited to 1« hours a day by doctors), Prokofiev could still write the most infectious happy music imaginable. The Stone Flower, for example, while not on the level of Romeo And Juliet or Cinderella, or even of early ballets like Chout and Le Pas D'Acier, still is full of catchy tunes and joyousness.
Sergei Prokofiev, the Soviet Union's greatest artistic hero, died on March 5, 1953. The date was an irony he surely would have savored, for on that day the Soviet Union's most evil villain, Josef Stalin, had also died, as if God somehow balances the scales at such times.
It must not be overlooked that Prokofiev, besides being a composer to stand with the greatest, was also a virtuoso pianist of the highest rank and a brilliant conductor. Beyond these talents, he was a master chess player, said to be the stuff of world-class ability had he cultivated greater interest in the game. Needless to say, it can be fairly assessed that Prokofiev was a genius of the rarest order.
Comments upon this article may be sent to:
Robert D. Cummings at rcumming@csrlink.net
