By Olga Fyodorova
...It is May 10, 1914... At the
Petrograd Conservatory pianists are taking their
graduation exams. There is a very special atmosphere of solemn tension
reigning in the vaulted premises of
the Conservatory's main hall. One of the examinees gets up and, approaching
members of the examination panel, starts handing
out freshly printed booklets with the words “Concerto for Piano
and Orchestra by Sergei Prokofiev” written in bold letters.
“Are you going to play your own concerto?”
“Yes, I’d like to... It's my latest thing...”
“I've already played it in concert and people liked it, they really did...
That's why I made it part of my examination program...”
“This young man's a great pianist. I guess he's the only one who
can play all the finger-twisting compositions he wrote here!”
“Finger-twisting is just the word. That was terrible, it really was!”
“He definitely merits our top, Anton Rubinstein,
award!”
“Maybe, but as a Conservatory director, and jury chairman, I just can’t
announce him the winner! No way! This is not music, no sir! This is something
I neither understand, nor accept!”
“I can’t believe my ears! I can’t believe that Alexander Glazunov,
an outstanding composer, pianist, conductor and progressively-minded
musician, can say that! Don’t you see that this fellow is way ahead of
his course-mates, that his music, unorthodox as it may sound, is so fresh
and fascinating! He is the hands down winner, by far and without any doubt!
Are you going to give the top prize to any of these sugar-face young ladies
so carefully playing Chopin and Mozart note for note?! No, you can’t
deny the fact that Prokofiev is a personality all his own!”
“Okay, okay... Let him have it... I don’t like his music, but I will go
along with the rest of the jury so that no one can tell me I overlooked
a real talent. Where’s the diploma? I’ll sign it...”
Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in the village of Solntsovka
in southern Russia where his father managed a large and rich
estate. Sergei was steeped in music played by his mother who was a fine
pianist. At the age of five he wrote his first piano piece and four years
later he came up with The Giant, an opera in three acts written to his
own story. This opera was produced at his uncle’s summerhouse with a family
cast. Excited by what was going on, the author burst into tears before
the curtain went down, bringing the whole presentation to an early end.
Soon after Prokofiev began taking regular
lessons with the famous Conservatory Professors Sergei Taneyev and Reingold
Gliere. Admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory at the age of 15, Sergei
Prokofiev later graduated as a certified pianist,
conductor and composer.
His early premieres were all marred by scandals drawing vocal
protests from some in the audience and equally vociferous cheers
from others. After another such concert in
Petrograd, a local newspaper published a
satire, which, among other things, wrote the following:
“The curtain goes up and there is a baby-faced Sergei Prokofiev walking
out on the stage. Sitting down by the grand piano, he starts either brushing
up the keys as if trying to see which of them sound higher, and which
lower... His strikes are as abrupt as they are dry. The audience
is bewildered! The whole thing sounds crazy... People
start filing out, one by one. There is a scandal brewing up...
An arrogant looking Prokofiev stands up, bows and starts
playing again. People start catcalling "To hell with this futuristic
rubbish! We can as well hear the same thing done by a cat back home!”
“Prokofiev is a genius! How fresh, driven and absolutely one of a kind
music!” enthuses a group of progressively-minded critics across the hall...
Graduating from the Conservatory in 1914, Sergei Prokofiev made a brief
trip to London where he met the famous Russian impresario Sergei Dyagilev
who commissioned him to write a ballet to the theme of Russian fairly tales.
Prokofiev eagerly jumped to the occasion blissfully unaware that it would
take his first ballet a whole seven years to see daylight... And also that
he would more than once write for Dyagilev’s Ballet
Russe Company...
Engulfed by his purely musical endeavors, Prokofiev somehow
failed to sense the grim rumblings of the coming war. He made it just in
time to get back home from Europe where the deadly flames of Word War One
were already rising up...
Being the only son of a widowed mother Sergei Prokofiev avoided
the draft and could keep working on.
That’s when he wrote an opera “The Gambler” after Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
novel of the same name, along with a raft of smaller pieces. Then, in the
summer of 1917, Prokofiev sat down to write his first symphony...
Years later he said: "It seemed to me that if Haydn were still alive
he would have retained his writing manner but, at the same time, would
have picked up some new trends too... That’s exactly the style I used in
my Classical Symphony. First, because that was the easiest way out
and, secondly, because I wanted to poke some fun at the conservatives.
I also hoped that, some day, my symphony would become a classic
too.”
In the fall of 1917, word about
the Bolshevik revolution finally reached the
Solntsovka village where Prokofiev was spending the war years. Terrified
by the news and surmising that it would take some time for
music to become relevant again, the composer left
Russia to settle down in America.
“People got interested in me in the States, Prokofiev reminisced years
later. My first concert was in New York on November
20, 1918 and had some sensationalist ring to it.
Critics did write some stupid things, though,, comparing
the finale of my sonata to a herd of mammoths charging
ahead on an Asian plateau... As to my playing, they wrote about
“steel muscles, steel biceps, steel wrists and steel fingers... As a result,
a black elevator operator at the hotel I was staying
at touched by arms and murmured
approvingly: "Yeah, muscles of steel, that’s right...”
In Chicago the increasingly popular Russian composer
was commissioned to write an opera. Choosing Carlo Gozzi’s “The Love of
Three Oranges” tale of an enchanted prince and an orange-bound princess
as the main theme, Prokofiev enthusiastically got down to work...
In the summer of 1919 the opera was finished, but the theater was in no
hurry to stage Prokofiev’s new work which only premiered on December 30,
1921... Prokofiev wrote that it was “a full house and the whole thing looked
like a big success. The Chicagoans were at once proud and
ill at ease giving a “modernistic premiere”
whose production cost had soared up to a staggering 250,000
dollars.”
The premiere of the Third Piano Concerto came that same month with the
piano part played by the author. Receiving a pretty lukewarm welcome in
Chicago, the concerto then flopped in New York. Few people could imagine
that, just a few decades later, the
Third Concerto, just like everything else written by
the daring Russian composer, would become classics...
In early 1922, having no serious plans for the future, Prokofiev
left America and made his home in Germany paying occasional visits to France,
Britain, Italy and Spain. His concerts being a huge success, he was commissioned
to write more and more...
Now an internationally recognized celebrity, Prokofiev
was invited to get back to Russia. Fearing the prospect of settling down
in his Bolshevik-ruled homeland, Prokofiev still mulled the
idea of playing a series of concerts there.
In 1927, after a long hiatus, Sergei Prokofiev made a triumphal tour of
Russia followed by another one two years later. He was so happy to see
familiar faces and hear his native language again! The Soviet authorities
tried hard to make the composer believe that the new Russia really was
a land of the free where people enjoyed all the artistic
freedoms they ever needed and that he was free to perform abroad
any-time he wanted...
In the late 1932 a largely convinced
Prokofiev finally dared to get back to Soviet Russia... only to see Stalin's
Iron Curtain going down... Only once was he allowed to make a foreign tour
in the twenty long years that followed...
* * *
After 14 years of voluntary emigration to the United States and Europe,
Sergei Prokofiev was finally back in Russia. But it was a completely
different country now. Sincerely willing to join in the new life, Prokofiev
was working hard turning out a raft of new compositions. Sometimes,
eager to better fall into step, he tried his hand in writing marching songs
that extolled the enthusiasm of Stalin’s builders of Communism, but with
little success…
“In 1934 Leningrad’s Kirov Theater approached me suggesting that
I think about writing a ballet,” Prokofiev later recalled. “Our final pick
was Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, but the contract never came… I negotiated
with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow but, looking at the score, they flatly
turned it down saying it was too complicated and all…”
The score eventually landed at the Kirov Theater in Leningrad, but
many people there didn’t like the music at all. The young Galina
Ulanova chosen to dance Juliet’s part would say the music was absolutely
undanceable. The orchestra was on the verge of calling a strike refusing
to play. Choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky was probably the only one
there who, feeling the real magnitude of the score, was ready to work day
and night…
After months of daily rehearsals, the dancers finally got used to
what they initially dismissed as too complicated. Some even said they now
liked the music… The premiere offered by a generally pessimistic company
was a deafening success and before long “Romeo and Juliet” was one of the
best loved ballets around...
During the Thirties, Sergei Prokofiev teamed up with the great film
director Sergei Eizenstein composing the musical score for the film “Alexander
Nevsky”. The story celebrating the rout of the Teutonian Knights on the
frozen surface of Lake Peipus carried vivid parallels with the present
underscoring the leader’s all-important role in history – an idea that
was so dear to the heart of the then Communist leader Josef Stalin who
even said he liked Prokofiev’s music…
Prokofiev later expanded this music into a cantata of the same name,
which quickly caught on with the public and has since been very popular
in this country and just about everywhere else…
By the time Nazi Germany crossed the Soviet border on June 22, 1942,
Prokofiev was writing “Cinderella,” a new ballet for Galina Ulanova who
had long since come to appreciate his music…
With the Russian army in retreat and German bombs coming down on
the Russian cities and villages, Prokofiev knew that he would have to put
the beautiful tale on hold. He later got back to it producing an amazingly
poetic ballet that premiered in Moscow on November 21, 1945.
Just a few days into the war, Prokofiev started having ideas about
writing an epic opera after Leo Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace”. Three
years later he had a rough version already down…
The opera “War and Peace” was originally designed as a two-night
event meaning that the stage production would be nothing short of a logistical
nightmare. In the fall of 1944 a concert version consisting of 11 episodes
was finally unveiled…
Sergei Prokofiev did not live to see his brainchild staged. Several
stagings appeared only after his death and a full version only happened
once during the Nineties…
Other significant wartime works include the music score to Eizenstein’s
“Ivan the Terrible” film epic and the larger than life Fifth Symphony extolling
the composer’s own vision of a free and happy man…
The Fifth Symphony premiered on January 13, 1944, just a few months
before Victory day. The success of Prokofiev’s self-conducted new work
was absolutely deafening…
In a totalitarian state any real talent is a cause of irritation
to the political leaders and this old truth was proven tragically apt in
1948, when this country’s Communist leadership unleashed a vicious campaign
of criticism against some of the best composers Russia ever had…
An internationally renowned authority, Sergei Prokofiev was blissfully
unaware of the storm clouds gathering over his head. An article in the
Communist mouthpiece “Pravda” lambasting Vano Muradeli’s generally feeble
opera “The Great Friendship” and also containing angry swipes at Dmitry
Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev and other so-called “formalists”,
came as a bolt from the blue…
The hard-hitting editorial in the country’s leading newspaper sent
out a clear signal for a nationwide campaign of persecution and firings
of “wrong-minded” conservatory professors. A number of newly-written pro-Communist
works like, for example, the “May Ye Flourish, A Mighty Land” cantata and
a symphonic poem written for the 30th anniversary of the October Revolution,
did little to save the author’s reputation…
Even worse, they stopped publishing and playing his old and new works
effectively depriving Prokofiev and his family of any means of subsistence.
Whatever money he had previously managed to save was dwindling fast…
Expected to make some politically correct “confessions”, Prokofiev
made none simply because he knew he had done nothing wrong. Meanwhile,
the noisy campaign of criticism and slander started taking its toll…
Ailing and heartbroken, Prokofiev kept writing... Spending his final
years at his country house just outside Moscow amid the Russian nature
he loved so much, Prokofiev wrote several new compositions he knew would
not be played in public any time soon, among them a symphonic concerto
for cello and orchestra. It was largely inspired by young and very talented
cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Driven and bubbling with new ideas, Rostropovich
spent hours on end with the ailing composer and, despite the big age difference,
the two soon became good friends. Small wonder that Rostropovich
was the first performer of this beautiful piece…
Still down but definitely not beaten, Prokofiev wrote the enchantingly
beautiful “Tale of the Stone Flower” ballet and several suites. His
last work, the Seventh Symphony, reflected the author’s amazingly kind
and optimistic view of the surrounding world.
On October 11, 1952, the Seventh Symphony premiered in the Conservatory
Big Hall in Moscow played by the State Radio Orchestra led by Samuil Samosud.
Prokofiev was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize in 1957 for the Seventh
Symphony…
The end was tragically ironic. Sergei Prokofiev died on the same
day as Stalin – March 5, 1953. The whole country was mourning the
death of a tyrant and only a precious few were able to realize that on
that same day this country lost a real genius…
Only a handful of close friends were allowed to attend a civil funeral
the next day at the Composer’s Union. Before that, just a block or two
from the city center, Prokofiev’s friends gathered in his small apartment.
Unable to find anything in the city’s emptied flower shops, they adorned
the great composer’s coffin with conifer branches and indoor flowers. David
Oistrakh then took out his violin and played…
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