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This prediction was to be only half-fulfilled. Events, or at any rate their human agents, did not forgive the composer and, by his death 35 years later, they had taken a terrible revenge on him. The lack of understanding, however, proved to be all Prokofiev's. He was a highly intelligent if somewhat self-centred man, and this impercipience did not last forever - merely long enough for illumination to arrive too late.
Prokofiev lived in Paris during the Twenties and continued to do so for four years after his "return" to Russia in 1932. During his visits to the USSR, he lodged like a foreigner at Moscow's Hotel National, leaving his Spanish wife Lina at home with their sons Svyatoslav and Oleg. Temperamentally he was a dry and egocentric aesthete; politically, an unreconstructed capitalist. What could have possessed a man like this, at 40, to lay everything he had won from fifteen years of Western fame upon the indifferent altar of Soviet Communism?
Shostakovich's explanation in Testimony is that Prokofiev knew that Soviet culture was becoming fashionable in the West and that the USSR would not long tolerate him as a weekend guest. A permanent move to Moscow would improve his image from both angles while simultaneously putting him beyond the reach of certain parties in Europe to whom he owed money in connection with his interest in poker.
Some may call such deductions too cynical. For instance, Prokofiev's fellow émigré Nikolai Nabokov recalls him in Paris "continuously repeating that the Revolution for him was an inescapable, positive event of Russia's national history, and that he did not see in it, as so many of his compatriots did at the time, a desperate and fatal calamity". On the contrary, Nabokov insists, "he believed that the Russian Revolution was teaching a lesson to the West and would ultimately lead to a regeneration of European society".
If genuine , Prokofiev's high-minded stance of the mid-Twenties represents a remarkable shift from the position he had taken during the Revolution itself. Then, with bullets humming down the boulevards of Petrograd, he had stayed indoors writing the anti-Bolshevik cantata Seven, They Are Seven, using lines by Balmont based on inscriptions from an Akkadian temple:
Charity they know not,
Shame they know not,
Prayers they heed not, to entreaties they are deaf!
Earth and heaven shrink before them,
They clamp down whole countries as behind prison gates,
They grind nations, as nations grind grain!
During the mid-to-late Twenties, iconoclastic modernism was Prokofiev's calling card and being hailed by European critics as "an apostle of Bolshevism" for the constructivist ballet Le Pas d'acier was as useful in building a lucrative notoriety as being smeared by the American press as "a tool of Soviet propaganda" for the same composition.
This is not to deny that acquaintance with the Changing Landmarks school of fellow-travelling émigré writers and conversations with the ballet's scenarist Sergei Yakulov (and later with Maxim Gorky in Sorrento) may have influenced Prokofiev into a rosier view of the Revolution than he might naturally have taken. What, though, would have carried more weight with him was favourable news of his standing at home - and, in the liberal era of the New Economic Policy (NEP), such news was not hard to come by.
Under the aegis of Anatoly Lunacharsky, People's Commissar for Enlightenment and a keen Prokofiev fan, the composer's music was being heard in both the opera house (The Love For Three Oranges in 1926) and the concert hall (by the conductorless Persimfans orchestra). Nor is there any doubt that Prokofiev badly missed Russia ("The air! The soil!"). Careful to retain his passport and ensure that all formalities were scrupulously observed when leaving in 1918, he clearly had a long-term plan, conditions permitting, for coming back - one perhaps so cherished that he was prepared to go a considerable way in self-deception in order to fulfil it.
Had he entertained a deeper interest in what was going on in his homeland, he might not have persuaded himself so easily. The "error" of Seven, They Are Seven was not the sort of thing lightly overlooked by the new regime, whose watchdogs were notorious for missing and forgiving nothing. Unknown to him, the composer had become an obsessive hate figure to Soviet Left activists.
His second visit, in November 1929, was very different. With Stalin in power, NEP had given way to the rigours of the First Five Year Plan and the radical Left were in full cry against "bourgeois individualism". Suspecting nothing, Prokofiev was invited to attend the Bolshoi's audition of his ballet Le Pas d'acier, an angular Modernist work depicting the industrialisation of Russia. Written to an opportunist commission from Diaghilev in 1925 when Soviet culture was first becoming chic in the West, the ballet had scandalised Europe, establishing Prokofiev as the daring "red composer" of the avant garde.
Despite the fact that to the Communist Left, he was an irredeemable "enemy of Soviet culture", Prokofiev must have assumed the work's success in the USSR to be a foregone conclusion. If Le Pas d'acier was an artist's fantasy of what life ought to have been like in modern Russia, the "comradely" discussion that followed it rudely introduced its composer to the reality of Soviet life in one of its ugliest phases.
A more diplomatic man might have disarmed his critics, but Prokofiev's response to charges of "dilettantism" was a display of terse arrogance. Tearing into the ballet with hyperbolic fury, the Leftists damned it as "a counter-revolutionary composition bordering on Fascism" and, powerless to do otherwise, the Bolshoi's directors turned it down. A piqued Prokofiev departed for Paris to reassess his position.
Despite this ominous brush with raw revolution, Prokofiev's renewed fascination with Mother Russia diluted what should have been a resolve never to go there again into a characteristically expedient decision to wait and see. Dismissing Rachmaninov and Stravinsky - who had had the sense to put Russia behind them - as rootless and declining talents, he projected his own brief lack of inspiration (On the Dnieper, the Fourth Piano Concerto) onto Western art as a whole, declaring it precious and irrelevant. In effect, he was already trapped, unable to do much more than wait for better news from the country he had convinced himself he couldn't do without.
In April 1932, Prokofiev heard what he took to be The Word: the Central Committee's decree on the restructuring of existing artistic factions into centralised unions. The Left was no more, its adherents forswearing their "vulgar sociology" to embrace the new official creed of Socialist Realism.
Sold as paternalistic concern for the welfare of Soviet culture, Stalin's unionisation of art actually entailed total control of creativity in the service of the state, the sordid work of coercion to be visited by the artists upon each other. As in other walks of Soviet life, this allowed the talentless to avenge themselves on the talented by every means from bureaucratic scheming to posting anonymous "denunciations" to the secret police.
Prokofiev was not alone in being deceived by the 1932 decree; even Shostakovich, whose experience of political arm twisting was already extensive, welcomed it (or let himself be officially presented as so doing). Prokofiev does, however, seem to have allotted wishful thinking an imprudent prominence in his analysis of events. Chatting with Viktor Seroff in Paris before leaving for Moscow, he explained how he saw it:
"Here I have to kow-tow to publishers, managers, committees, sponsors of productions, patronesses of art, and conductors each time I wish my work to be performed. A composer doesn't have to do that in Russia. And as for 'politics', they don't concern me. It is none of my business."Sadly, Prokofiev's acquaintance with both politics and kow-towing was only just beginning.
Despite his highly publicised "return" to the USSR, the composer spent much of the next four years in Paris, where his family remained and where he wrote most of his Soviet commissions. How far this failure to commit himself was due to caution is unclear. His closest adviser Myaskovsky had consistently warned him to stay put and his Western contacts never hid their own misgivings. More importantly, his wife Lina strongly wished to avoid uprooting herself in order to move to a colourless world in which makeup was derided as "the mask of the society matron" and tracking down the makings of a decent dinner required either a Party card or the patience of a saint.
Nonetheless, Prokofiev remained convinced that he should go. Without doubt, nostalgia was the main impulse, with the lure of being a big fish in a small pond an enticing secondary consideration. However, he seems also to have genuinely believed that the situation in Russia would better not only his own work, but the state of music in general.
The carrot was, however, accompanied by a discreet stick: until the composer's family and furniture followed him to Moscow, he could not become a full Soviet citizen with all the benefits that this entailed. Since one such benefit was a "luxury apartment" (as, from 1933, was awarded to any artist proving himself a reliable conduit of state propaganda), Prokofiev stayed mostly in Soviet hotels, his contact with the outside world limited to official newspapers and phone-calls to Lina in Paris.
At first, he had too much trouble finding his feet on the cultural scene to notice which way the political wind was blowing. Arriving at a time when everyone was trying hard not to be something called a Formalist and the benchmark of artistic success was being set by elephantine novels about hydroelectric dams, Prokofiev was puzzled to discover that, from the perspective of Socialist Realism, his recent neoclassical scores lacked "actuality of subject matter".
On the other hand there were, he was told, vast quantities of this peculiar substance in his friend Myaskovsky's "Collective Farm" Symphony and the grandiose "song symphonies" of Lev Knipper. Fortunately, before he was forced to try his hand at a Soviet Hotel Symphony, Prokofiev was asked to score Lieutenant Kije. Ruined by the censor, the film sank without trace but the music, salvaged as a suite, was a big hit with the Soviet public.
Prokofiev's hit, silk ties, and patrician manner predictably infuriated the ex-Leftists, now jockeying for position in the Composers' Union. Playing on his vanity, they tempted him into compromising remarks and he incautiously obliged them, observing that to ignore new developments in Western music would render Soviet composers "provincial" and calling for a new "grand style" suited to the requirements of a heroic people (which his enemies deliberately misinterpreted as meaning one style for the intelligentsia and another for the workers).
Meanwhile, the lull in political upheavals came to an abrupt end on 1st December 1934 with the murder of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov (shot, on Stalin's order, so as to provide an excuse for a more sweepingly efficient destruction of the dictator's enemies - the only commodity in Russia of which there was an apparently limitless supply).
Was Prokofiev worried by these developments? Seemingly not. So wrapped up in his work that the fate of others failed to deflate his perpetual optimism, he had not even noticed that he was running out of friends. Lunacharsky was dead and Gorky about to join him. Myaskovsky, though still faithful, was toeing the Party line in every work he produced. But the most ominous indications surrounded Prokofiev's staunchest supporter, the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold.
In the aftermath of the Kirov assassination, Party meetings all over Russia had turned into confessional sessions on various themes, one of which was repentance for "former infatuation with the theatre of Meyerhold". As the pace of events accelerated in 1935, "Meyerholdism", signifying an effete brand of "anti-people" élitism, brewed up into a scandal - and Prokofiev, one of Meyerhold's most obviously effete associates, was a prime candidate for being drawn into it.
Yet far from looking to his safety, he was enjoying an idyllic summer in the country with Lina and the children, composing Romeo and Juliet and the Second Violin Concerto. Still ostensibly oblivious of the changing climate, he left Lina in Moscow to prepare for the final move six months later, took the boys back to Paris for their last year at lycée, and toured the new concerto through Southern Europe, returning to Russia in time for the New Year.
Against this, it must be said that the authorities let the Prokofievs go abroad again in January to wind up their affairs in Paris - and this just before the Pravda attacks on Shostakovich shook Soviet music to its foundations. It is tempting to suppose that Prokofiev was simply too politically naive to realise which way the wind was blowing; yet such a deduction is arguably too simple. (See, for example, the remarks on the Second Violin Concerto in Part Three of this article.)
Conceivably, the composer felt irrevocably committed to a final return, trapped by his pro-Soviet public statements (or his foreign gambling debts). Perhaps he believed nothing terrible could befall an apolitical man in Russia so long as he did and said the right things. (His only work during his January stopover was on the mass-songs of Opus 66, a simplistic idiom to which he had previously been too fastidious to stoop.) Whatever the truth, neither the Pravda affair nor the urgent counselling of his friends in Paris were enough to slow the momentum of his careering life.
In March 1936, he returned to Moscow, leaving Lina and the boys to follow him. This time, the change of atmosphere was unignorable. The Terror had begun in earnest, the papers were full of denunciations, and a regime of silent anxiety had entered daily life. According to Seroff, the authorities now withdrew the composer's passport, stranding him in the Metropol Hotel:
"He did not even have Lina with whom to share the daily gruesome news... All he could do was to write meaningless postcards (all letters were censored) and keep telephoning her, urging her to come to him. He was virtually a prisoner of the State."
The situation was, by any standard, unnerving. The waves of arrests that had been building since 1935 were now mountainous and, as the year progressed, the trials of Stalin's rivals trailed a parade of grotesque confessions across the pages of the world's press. Had Prokofiev been at the emergency session of the Soviet Composers' Union in Moscow that February (he was on tour in Europe), he might yet have reconsidered his move to Russia. Convened to debate the Pravda editorials of 28th January and 6th February accusing Shostakovich of "anti-people Formalism", these proceedings soon degenerated into frenzied denunciation of everyone in sight.
Quick to join in was Tikhon Khrennikov, a mediocrity determined to make a splash. "Too late," notes Viktor Seroff, "in denouncing Shostakovich, Khrennikov was anxious to be the first to assail Sergei Prokofiev, thus showing his foresight, a quality much appreciated by the Communist Party". Seizing on Prokofiev's unguarded remarks of 1934 about "provincialism" and a new "grand style", Khrennikov demanded to know how this foreign Formalist dared lecture loyal Bolsheviks on composing music for a revolution he had run away from.
Returning to the USSR in March, Prokofiev got himself into hotter water by venturing that a sensible definition of Formalism might be "music which one does not understand at first hearing". However, fine points of aesthetics were not greatly valued by those now engaged in terrorising the Soviet people into numbed submission. The composer began to find it hard to get work.
For inscrutable reasons, the Bolshoi production of Romeo and Juliet was suddenly cancelled; then, invited to contribute some pieces to the Pushkin centenary, Prokofiev found, on delivering them, that they were not wanted. The mass-songs of Opus 66 having failed to redeem him, he resolved to come straight to the point with his Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution.
Using texts by the big three of Soviet Communism, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, Prokofiev appears to have assumed he had caught the style in vogue - yet, once again, he misjudged the situation. The cantata was intercepted at its audition by Stalin's underlings who rubbished it for "Leftist deviation and vulgarity" (i.e., for dragging Marx and Lenin into it).
Desperate to contribute something - anything - to the 20th anniversary, the composer threw together a concoction of folk-tunes and Party singalongs entitled Songs Of Our Days. Mysteriously held back till 1938, the work was thereupon dismissed as "pale and lacking in individuality". Prokofiev must by now have been utterly bewildered. If he wrote like a simpleton, he was a depersonalised Left deviationist; if he wrote like Prokofiev, he was a mercenary Formalist. Individual, non-individual... there must have seemed no rhyme or reason to it - and, of course, none existed.
The novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, who met the composer at the Moscow Writers' Club around this time, records that "he was unhappy, even grim, and said to me, 'Today one must work; work's the only thing, the only salvation'". Insuring himself against creative impotence by turning inwards, Prokofiev started on his autobiography, Childhood.
Nikolai Nabokov, who met him during these trips, saw, in place of his usual breezy demeanour, a "profound and terrible insecurity", while an American hostess recalls Prokofiev as a "grouch" who sat through dinner without saying a word. Doubtless partly a sombre realisation that, once back in Russia, he could kiss goodbye to cordon bleu, his bad temper had another more sinister cause: he was under NKVD surveillance.
According to Seroff, "he avoided his former close friends, and if by any chance he happened to meet one of them, he made a quick sign with his eyes indicating that he was being watched". Though invited back to the States the following year, Prokofiev was prevented from going and the 1938 trip was his last crossing of the Russian border.
Shortly after returning home, his luck changed. The director Sergei Eisenstein had been ordered to film an anti-Nazi version of the life of Alexander Nevsky, the medieval prince of Novgorod who defeated the invading Teutonic Knights.
Like Prokofiev, Eisenstein had returned to the USSR in 1932, though he had thereupon vanished from view so completely that for years it was thought that he had been liquidated as a "renegade".
Reappearing on the world stage as a victim of the drive against Formalism in 1937, he had been reprimanded for "overweening conceit and aloofness from Soviet reality" and had since been unable to find work. All things considered, a lot hung on Alexander Nevsky for both men and, working under tight government supervision, they were careful to do exactly what they gathered Stalin wanted. Their luck held: Stalin approved.
Like Eisenstein, Meyerhold had been pilloried in 1937, while his theatre had been closed as "alien and hostile to Soviet aims". Enjoying a good argument, he had given as good as he got in a way no one else ever dared do, his subsequent survival being widely regarded as a kind of paranormal phenomenon. He was, in short, trouble, and Prokofiev's belief that he could transmit his own rehabilitation to Meyerhold by involving him in his next triumph proved to be yet another mistake.
In June 1939, the director was arrested and his actress wife gruesomely murdered. Shaken, Prokofiev begged Eisenstein to take over but, thinking fast, the latter replied that he was busy. Then, in August 1939, the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed and suddenly operas about German atrocities were no longer in demand. Following a visit from Prosecutor Vishinsky, Semyon Kotko turned into an opera about Austrian atrocities (the Ukrainian setting being retained in order to avoid having to repaint the scenery).
Towards the end of the year, Meyerhold died in jail under torture. Prokofiev's opera survived a short season before being taken off and left unplayed for twenty years. Meanwhile, he hastily concluded his autobiography (at a diplomatically early age) and wrote Hail To Stalin for the dictator's 60th birthday, receiving a gruff acknowledgement from the Boss for his thoughtfulness.
That she was politically orthodox is conceivably of no sinister significance. More important was that she made him happy, to some extent softened his character, and inspired him to create. Accompanying him on evacuation to the Caucasus at the start of the war, she soon had him working on War and Peace and Cinderella. Friends were astonished to report him smiling.
The success of Romeo and Juliet, at last produced by the Kirov in 1940, compensated for the disaster of Semyon Kotko and Prokofiev's return to favour was cemented by the Seventh Piano Sonata in 1942. A halcyon period now ensued, his Second Violin Sonata, Fifth Symphony, Cinderella, and score for Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible Part I making him Russia's most popular composer. He seemed, finally, to have found his Soviet feet.
Stalin, meanwhile, chose to mark victory in the Great Patriotic War by decreeing an era of chauvinism in which all Western inventions were said to have been made first by Russians and the price of a warm remark about the Allies was twenty-five years' cold storage in Siberia. Accompanying this came a new wave of purges directed by Stalin's hatchetman Zhdanov, who was soon attacking Eisenstein's failure, in Ivan the Terrible Part II, to depict the Tsar with the correct Stalin-like dignity. (Stalin had recently formed the view that Ivan had been a previous incarnation of his.) This blow broke Eisenstein and must have shocked Prokofiev, whose music was all over the soundtrack.
Around this time, his usual productivity tapered off. Apart from completing the First Violin Sonata, his attention was for eighteen months devoted to the Sixth Symphony, a brooding, tragic work which absorbed him deeply. Premièred by Mravinsky in Leningrad in October 1947, it drew thirty minutes of applause from an audience to whom it clearly spoke volumes.
Music's turn to feel Zhdanov's boot on its neck came in February 1948. Officially, the cause was the failure of Vano Muradeli's opera The Great Friendship to entertain the Boss. Semi-officially, it was sparked by Politburo fury over the poor showing of the country's leading composers at the Revolution's 40th anniversary (Prokofiev's Flourish, Mighty Land, Myaskovsky's The Kremlin At Night, and Shostakovich's Poem Of The Motherland having all been flops).
In fact, the '48 affair, another step in the mechanisation of Russia's intellectual life, had been in the pipeline for years. From a file supplied by Khrennikov, Zhdanov was able to inform the assembly that not only had Prokofiev enjoyed a privileged youth attended by "downtrodden" servants, but that there was no record of him having helped the peasants with the harvest. On the contrary, he had, like a typical exploiter, lounged indoors playing the piano. Other contributors wished it to be known that the composer dressed like a dandy, had soft hands, and owned an American razor.
Too unwell to attend, Prokofiev was obliged to thank the Party for its guiding wisdom and admit his "alien" Formalism in a letter read before the Central Committee. (Published in the Soviet press, this confession, to which he probably contributed little more than his signature, duly baffled Western observers.) To drive the point home, the composer's Sixth Symphony, "War Sonatas", and works written between abroad 1918 and 1932 were all banned. Rocked by the death of Eisenstein, Prokofiev became seriously ill.
Soon after came the fiasco of the composer's dutiful song-opera The Story Of A Real Man, ruined because the orchestra were too frightened about playing music by an Enemy of the People to be able to stop their fingers shaking. The egregious Khrennikov, now First Secretary of the Composers' Union, dutifully savaged the work for "bourgeois Formalism, anti-melodious content, and lack of understanding of Soviet heroism and Soviet humanity" - not so much criticism as a deliberate attempt to break Prokofiev's spirit and health for good. Six months later, the same treatment was meted out to his ballet The Stone Flower.
The composer's final years were a scandalous tale of neglect. In 1950, the state awarded him Stalin Prizes, second grade, for his suite Winter Bonfire and oratorio On Guard for Peace - but this was little more than a pretence of rehabilitation linked to the so-called "struggle for peace", a strategy by Stalin to mobilise pacifism in the West by using Soviet artists as cultural ambassadors.
Apart from the care of Mira, the only saving grace of Prokofiev's last period was his relationship with the young cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Deprived of income, he was, for the first time in his life, experiencing hardship. Rostropovich's wife Galina Vishnevskaya has described how her husband, finding a "helpless and bewildered" Prokofiev unable to pay his cook, went and shouted at Khrennikov until he coughed up some union funds.
The composer's last works were either conformist or noncommittal. Even the quietest pages of his Symphony-Concerto are guarded, as if he feared to be accused of musical "facecrime" - of not smiling confidently enough at the prospect of his country's ever-receding "radiant future". "My soul hurts," he kept whispering to Mira during his final illness.
Prokofiev died on 5th March 1953, fifty-five minutes before Stalin. He was 61. At his memorial service, David Oistrakh played the first and third movements of the composer's First Violin Sonata. Then 37, Mira Mendelson devoted herself to looking after the composer's archive and effects until her own death in 1968.
"Posterity will not be able to understand our difficult and glorious period of life without intently listening to the works of Sergei Prokofiev, and contemplating his extraordinary fate."Had Ehrenburg said this about Shostakovich, few Western pundits (in recent years, at least) would have missed what he was getting at. Applying similar criteria to Prokofiev, however, is still quite a new idea.
Though much of his brisk arrogance was curbed by the adversity of his final years, Prokofiev remained fundamentally self-centred, interested chiefly in his own inner world. His capacity, or desire, to empathise with the lot of other people being limited, it is hardly surprising that, compared with Shostakovich, his work should be thinner on tragic subtexts. All too often brilliantly one-dimensional, a large part of Prokofiev's music is that of a clever, derisive child, achieving its best effects in the context of fairy-tale, romanticised history, or nostalgia for boyhood.
As with Ravel, whom he particularly admired, Prokofiev's engagement with the practical world of adulthood was reluctant (and often sarcastically ill-tempered). Unlike Ravel, however, it was his "extraordinary fate" to be forced to see far enough beyond his own predicament for his creativity to deepen in spite of itself. Whatever else it did to him, life in the USSR made him grow up.
While less interested in the moral predicaments of Soviet life than his rival Shostakovich, Prokofiev was far from a complete political naïf. On the contrary, he demonstrably knew what times he was living in and, when he felt impelled to, informed his music with this knowledge. How soon he saw the truth of the situation in Stalin's USSR is hard to assess, and, unless new evidence on this subject comes to light, all judgements on it must remain conjectural.
It is easy, for example, to make a case that by 1938 Prokofiev was aware of what was going on in Russia and reflecting this awareness in his music. Apart from musical testimony to this effect, there is the monumental fact of Stalin's Terror, which had by then grown so intense that even the most self-absorbed aesthete could hardly fail to notice it. It is similarly legitimate to suggest that the composer's Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution of 1936-7, far from being entirely earnest, is tongue-in-cheek and, in parts, actively satirical.
In other words, though novel in the context of current assumptions about Prokofiev, it is fair to deduce that he began to take a critical attitude to the Soviet regime after finally settling there in 1936 and perceiving what sort of a cauldron he had landed himself in. It is, however, pushing the boundaries of the acceptable to suggest that his music contains hints of such a critical outlook prior to his conclusive move back to Russia in May 1936. Why would he have made the move if he had already formed such an opinion?
Here speculation runs out of road. As things stand, we simply do not know, in the end, why Prokofiev chose to return to his homeland. Yet there is reason to think that by mid-1935 he had realised, if only on a creative level, that the USSR was in the hands of people fundamentally hostile to his artistic vision.
Probably he believed that he could appeal directly to the Soviet people via his scores, thereby placing himself safely above the argument. Indeed, in terms of strategy, his main work of 1935, Romeo and Juliet was almost certainly designed to outflank the apparatchiki by winning the hearts of concertgoers.
If so, it is tempting to hear its contemporary companion, the Second Violin Concerto, as a covert satirical reply to the anti-symphonic faction within the Composers' Union. Surely the childishly pedantic arpeggio accompaniment to the aria-like theme of the work's slow movement ("clumsily" scored for flute) is tongue in cheek? In which case, what can it be but an ironic response to simple-minded demands for a lyric-heroic "symphonism of the People"? If this is so, the shadowy bass drum which drives the soloist to jump through hoops in the finale requires no explanation.
Prokofiev here arguably anticipates Shostakovich's own Second Violin Concerto written thirty years later. (If this interpretation is valid, it shows him abreast of his contemporary in commenting musically on the prevailing situation in the Soviet arts in 1935. Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony may have begun as a similar riposte to the "song-symphonism" advanced at the Composer's Union conference.)
During the two years before the work was commenced, around seven million Russians had been sent to the Gulag and about half a million shot. There is no space here to say anything adequate in furtherance of these bald statistics. These people had done nothing wrong and were rounded up merely to fill quotas designed to ensure that everyone in Russia knew someone who had "disappeared".
Prokofiev got as far as drafting the sonata's outer movements (linked by desolate scale passages which, he told Oistrakh, should sound "like the wind in a graveyard"), before being summoned to score Alexander Nevsky. Thereafter, as if oppressed by its monochrome solemnity, he avoided the piece for seven years, finishing it during work on the similarly dark Sixth Symphony in 1946.
In context, the threnody of the first movement and pale, elegiac third speak for themselves. Elsewhere, the contrast of wanly tender measures with music of military brutality expresses the impact on Soviet life of Stalin's new-wave apparatchiki - thugs who despised intellectuals and were indifferent to culture. In classic style, the viciousness of these men was exceeded only by their stupidity. Like Shostakovich, Prokofiev satirised them with the musical image of a club-fingered amateur pianist spraying out wrong notes - a device employed in both the finale of his First Violin Sonata and the second movement of the Sixth Piano Sonata.
First of the so-called "War Sonatas", the Sixth has recently been recorded by the young Russian virtuoso Yevgeny Kissin, who scornfully dismisses the idea that the work had anything to do with the war*:
"The Sixth Sonata was written in 1939, before the war, so the experience Prokofiev portrays is that of the period of Stalinist repression, the 'cult of personality'. He truly captures this in the bitter, pompous opening theme of the first movement, a sort of 'Stalin leitmotif' which returns in the finale. The second movement is a parody of a military march, full of Prokofiev's veiled humour, sarcasm and mischief.Andrei Gavrilov, too, rejects the received idea that the "War Sonatas" had anything to do with the struggle against Hitler:"The finale is truly a 'big sarcasm' and in the middle section Prokofiev recalls the 'Stalin leitmotif', giving it a completely different, ominous character to create a premonition of impending doom. And listen to what Prokofiev does at the very end of the coda: he crushes Stalin with the very weight of his own pompous leitmotif!"
"If we consider the Seventh as a kind of 'monster-mould' for the all-embracing Stalinist system, then we must accept the Eighth as an even deeper and more personal reaction to this theme."Gavrilov contends that in these works the composer was compelled by circumstance to explore new resources:
"Prokofiev's strong personality withstood the tragedy that surrounded him. Instead, he adopted a very critical attitude toward sentiment in general and expressed his views on life with irony, scepticism, and a great tendency towards sarcasm. In these two sonatas, however, Soviet reality weighed heavily upon Prokofiev and forced him (especially in the Eighth) to look at life in a more tragic light and to assume an active and personal role in the unfolding drama."Gavrilov's fascinating "political" analysis of these works is too long and detailed to reproduce here** - but the point is made. Properly called "Terror Sonatas", they exude an acidulous atmosphere indicative of scalding emotion contained at high pressure, as if serving as repositories for feelings unsafe to express in more public form.
The libretto for the Cantata is, in effect, a veiled critique of the Revolution up to the time it was written, and if Prokofiev alone was responsible for it, any idea that he was a political ingenu will have to be discarded. The work is nonetheless a dreadful botch for which the only obvious explanation is that the composer had initially planned to pursue a more blatantly subversive line than circumstances allowed.
To be specific, the Cantata came into being just as the Terror was reaching its peak and it is inconceivable that even so self-sufficient an artist could have remained oblivious of events in the world outside Nikolina Gora at that time. Thus, the work starts in a vein of almost blatant irony before retrenching to a dry inscrutability secreted within some of the most absurdly grandiose pages ever perpetrated by a major composer.
Opening in apocalyptic mood with an orchestral commentary on Marx's menacing epigraph "A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism", Prokofiev moves into satirical overdrive with the overtly ridiculous "The Philosophers", in which an apparent attack on pre-Marxist thinkers carries undertones of derision directed against all "philosophers", including the 19th century anarcho-nihilists upon whose intolerant texts Lenin's violent revolution was founded.
With "A Tight Little Band", we reach Lenin himself - and here again the title is to the point, for it was precisely the paranoiac élitism of the Bolsheviks which precipitated Russia into totalitarianism and civil war.
Considered as a subject for a musical setting, the text itself is intrinsically funny - yet here, as for the rest of the work, Prokofiev risks no obvious ironies. In effect, everything is in the libretto, the text of "Revolution", for example, arguably selected to display Lenin's essential fascism. Only the music disappoints, being an unlistenable eruption of bombastic kitsch. (Material from the "Symphony" was recycled in the Ode To the End of the War.)
Clarity returns briefly with the ominous introduction to the finale on Stalin's "Constitution", but generally speaking the Cantata is a compromised failure whose neglect is justified.
Less resilient in the face of Socialist Realist bullying, however, Prokofiev rarely dared speak as directly as Shostakovich did in his Ninth and Tenth symphonies. (The dissident critic Andrei Olkhovsky's suggestion that the chorus "Arise, Ye Russian People" in the meretricious Alexander Nevsky had a contemporary application seems forced in the context of the music itself.)
Even so, the dissonant distant brass in the mad motoric coda of his Fifth Symphony are as obviously admonitory as the over-all structure of the finale of Shostakovich's Tenth. (For signposts towards a deeper understanding of the Stalinist background to the Fifth Symphony, consult David Fanning's notes to Seiji Ozawa's otherwise disappointing version on Deutsche Grammophon 435029-2.) Moreover, taken as a whole, Prokofiev's great, and much misunderstood, Sixth Symphony is as explicitly dissident as his colleague's outspoken Thirteenth.
Protecting himself with the ambiguous statement that the Sixth was an expression of "admiration for the human spirit, manifested so clearly in our era and in our country", the composer's real intentions were nevertheless plain. Taking a leaf out of his friend Myaskovsky's book, he used all his resources of nostalgia to draw a heartbreaking contrast between the worlds of the old and new Russia, the former portrayed with yearning tenderness, the latter as a calamity of callous indifference.
"Kindness," wrote the memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, "is not an inborn quality - it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, its exponents as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times - the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant 'unmasking' of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action - all this taught us to be anything you like but kind."
As a précis of Prokofiev's Sixth, Mme Mandelstam's words are perfect. The same nostalgia for gentleness is present in the composer's Seventh Symphony, but at lower tension (and with a falsely optimistic coda tacked on by order of his masters). The Sixth, however, meets the issues head-on and its superb finale - routinely dismissed as a misconceived anti-climax by underinformed Western critics - is one of music's most sophisticated tragedies.
Here, a bustling mood of deliberate superficiality - such as one might assume in order to blot out fear or grief - is undermined by an ugly, drumming bass figure which, in the coda, achieves a victory of black negation paralleled in Shostakovich only by his Fourth Symphony. As in the finale of Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata, this crude, blundering bass motif is almost certainly a musical representation of Stalin himself.
There is, however, less evidence of panic in Shostakovich's output after 1938 than in that of Prokofiev, whose penchant for working on several pieces at once then degenerated into an undignified scramble to come up with something - anything - to please the authorities. This turmoil prevented continuous work on a number of substantial works, and the overall coherence of some of these (the so-called "War Sonatas", in particular) may have suffered as a result.
That he nonetheless managed to recover his poise and go on writing good music - including, in 1946, a symphony and a violin sonata high among the finest of our time - is formidable testimony to his inner strength.
In these works, Prokofiev acknowledged that while he himself was extraordinary, his fate was not, and that the tragedies and pain of others were things in which he shared and sympathised, and could turn into very great art.
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