Sergei Prokofiev
“The greatest virtue of my life — or its flaw, if you prefer — has always been the search for an original musical language of my own.” — from his autobiography
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyMaria Prokofieva
His first piano teacher, and the mother who, after the Revolution, left Russia and stayed by her son's side all the way into exile.
- TeacherNikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
He took notice of him at the conservatory entrance exam and taught him orchestration, though the young student found his classes conservative.
- FriendshipNikolai Myaskovsky
A colleague ten years his senior whom he met at the conservatory, and until his death in 1950 the most trusted first reader of his scores.
- PatronageSergei Diaghilev
As impresario of the Ballets Russes, he staged Chout, Le pas d'acier and The Prodigal Son, steering Prokofiev's career in the West.
- RivalryIgor Stravinsky
An older compatriot, forever compared with him in Diaghilev's circle and the Paris music world; the two disparaged each other yet kept up their acquaintance.
- FamilyLina Prokofiev
His first wife, married in 1923, who bore him two sons; arrested in 1948, she spent 8 years in the camps.
I. Only son of the steppe · 1891–1904 (age 0–13)
(Birth) He was born in April 1891 in Sontsovka, a rural village in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire (today Ukraine). His father, Sergei Alexeyevich, was an agronomist who managed the estate of the Sontsov family, its landowners; his mother, Maria Grigoryevna, was a cultivated woman who loved to play the piano. Because the two daughters born before him had died in infancy, he grew up, in effect, an only son. (Mother) His first music teacher was his mother. Sitting beside her as she played Beethoven and Chopin each evening, he composed a short piano piece called “Indian Galop” at about the age of five, and his mother wrote it down in notation. His father taught him mathematics and foreign languages himself. At nine he wrote an opera, The Giant, and staged it with the members of the household. (Glière) In 1902 he showed his work to the composer Sergei Taneyev in Moscow, and as a result the young composer Reinhold Glière spent two summers, in 1902 and 1903, at Sontsovka teaching him harmony and form. Glière had the boy write short pieces steadily, and the boy, calling them his ‘little songs,’ piled up dozens of them. (Temperament) The estate, set in the middle of the steppe, was remote, but there he learned chess and formed the habit of keeping a diary and writing letters with meticulous care. His precise, methodical temperament and his hatred of losing caught the adults' attention even then. In 1904, at thirteen, he left with his mother for Petersburg.
II. The conservatory rebel · 1904–1914 (age 13–23)
(Admission) In 1904 he turned up for the entrance examination of the Petersburg Conservatory carrying four operas, two sonatas, a symphony and a number of piano pieces. Rimsky-Korsakov sat on the examining board, and by Prokofiev's own recollection he took a keen interest in the boy. Yet in the orchestration class that followed, the two never grew particularly close. (Discord) Among his older classmates he was a sly, arrogant student who tallied other people's mistakes in charts. The classes of Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov sounded conservative to his ear, and the professors frowned at his harsh dissonances. He learned what was of real use instead from Anna Yesipova in piano and Nikolai Tcherepnin in conducting. It was here, too, that he met Nikolai Myaskovsky, a fellow student ten years his senior; their friendship and correspondence lasted a lifetime. (Loss) His father's death in 1910 left the family in straitened circumstances. In the spring of 1913 his conservatory friend Maximilian Schmidthof took his own life. That summer Prokofiev dedicated to this friend his Piano Concerto No. 2, premiered in Pavlovsk. The long, dark solo passage (cadenza) of the first movement bewildered the audience, and some left their seats jeering. (Graduation) At his piano graduation recital in the spring of 1914 he played, instead of a classical concerto, his own Piano Concerto No. 1, and won the Anton Rubinstein Prize awarded to the top graduate. So the rebel left the school on the strength of his own music.
Dedicated to Schmidthof, the conservatory friend who took his own life. The jeers of the premiere and the losses of youth are etched into it together.
- At the opening of the first movement, over a quiet accompaniment in the strings, the piano sings a cool, lonely melody. Listen with the knowledge that it was written in the year he lost a friend, and its composure aches all the more.
- The cadenza late in the first movement (the passage where the orchestra stops and the soloist plays alone) is so long that it fills nearly half the movement, and its ever-thickening chords collide at the climax with the return of the brass. Among pianists it counts as one of the great ordeals.
- The second-movement scherzo (a fast, playful movement) has the pianist's two hands racing without pause through the same melody an octave (eight degrees) apart for a little over two minutes. With barely a moment to breathe, this perpetuum mobile (unbroken rapid motion) tests the performer's stamina.
- The score heard today is the 1923 version. The original was lost in a fire in revolutionary Petrograd, and the composer rewrote it from memory and his notes.
- In the fourth movement, fiercely hammered chords alternate with a middle-section melody as plain as a Russian folk song. How sharply the two characters are contrasted is the point on which performances are compared.
III. Haydn and the Scythians · 1914–1918 (age 23–27)
(Diaghilev) On a trip to London that was his graduation present, he met Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev commissioned a ballet from him, but on seeing the score of Ala and Lolli, a tale of the ancient Scythians, he turned it down. Prokofiev reworked the music into the orchestral Scythian Suite and premiered it in Petrograd in 1916; the story goes that the elder composer Glazunov walked out in the middle of the performance. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring had already shaken Paris, and from then on, in Diaghilev's orbit, the two Russians were forever being compared. (War) During the First World War he was exempted from conscription as the only son of a widow, and he stayed on in the conservatory and the musical world of Petrograd, continuing to compose. (Haydn) In 1916–17 he resolved to try writing a symphony without the piano, in his head alone. His model was Haydn. Imagining how Haydn would have written had he been alive today, he made his Symphony No. 1, the “Classical,” which hides whimsical modulations and wide leaps within the tidy frame of the eighteenth century. This piece, reviving an old style in a new way, is counted as an early harbinger of the current later called ‘neoclassicism.’ The Violin Concerto No. 1 and the piano collection Visions fugitives also date from this period. (Revolution) In 1917 two revolutions broke out, and the city sank into hunger and chaos. He judged that for the time being there was no place for his music in this country. In April 1918, after conducting the premiere of the “Classical” Symphony himself, he went to the People's Commissar for Education, Lunacharsky, to ask leave to go abroad. Lunacharsky tried to hold him back but in the end granted permission.
A symphony written without the piano on the eve of revolution, imagining how Haydn would write were he alive now. It was the orderly refuge he found in a chaotic age.
- The first theme of the first movement, in which the violins leap at a bound to a high note right after the opening chord, is a staple of orchestral auditions. Listen for the moments when, amid the Haydnesque tidiness, the music suddenly slips into an unexpected key.
- In the second-movement larghetto (rather slow), the violins sing a soft melody in a very high register. The passage is notorious for being hard to play in tune, and its transparency is what separates one performance from another.
- In place of a minuet, the third movement is a gavotte (an old French dance that begins in the middle of the bar). It lasts little more than a minute, and Prokofiev later reused its melody in the ballet Romeo and Juliet.
- Of the fourth movement, the composer recalled that he wanted to write it so joyfully that it would contain not a single minor chord. The figures that flute and violins dart through convey that intention exactly.
IV. Across the ocean · 1918–1923 (age 27–32)
(Journey) In May 1918 he took the Trans-Siberian Railway as far as Vladivostok, stayed about two months in Japan giving concerts in Tokyo and Yokohama, and crossed the Pacific to reach New York in September. Through the long journey he passed the time writing short stories. (Cold reception) American newspapers presented him as something like a Bolshevik musician with ‘fingers of steel.’ Audiences were astonished by his touch but cool toward his works. Rachmaninoff, who had emigrated around the same time, was swiftly establishing himself as a performer, and he was a constant point of comparison. The Love for Three Oranges, commissioned by the Chicago Opera, was postponed when the company's director Campanini died suddenly, and in the meantime Prokofiev got by on debt. The Chicago premiere in December 1921 was a success, but the New York performance the following year was savaged by the critics. (Lina) In New York he met Carolina Codina, a Madrid-born aspiring singer — Lina. Raised by a Spanish tenor father and a mother from the Russian Empire, she spoke Russian, and they met when she came to one of his recitals. For several years the two drew close and drifted apart again and again. (Turning point) In the summer of 1921, on the coast of Brittany in France, he wove together ideas he had been hoarding for years and completed the Piano Concerto No. 3. That same year Diaghilev staged his ballet Chout in Paris. Accepting his failure in America, in 1922 he moved to Ettal, a mountain village in Bavaria, Germany, where he lived with his mother, who had escaped from Russia, and threw himself into the opera The Fiery Angel. There, in the autumn of 1923, he married Lina.
Completed on the coast of Brittany from long-hoarded ideas, while he was holding out in America amid debt and indifference. It is the best loved of his concertos.
- The first movement opens with a calm, Russian-flavored melody sung by a solo clarinet. Within seconds the strings quicken and the piano plunges in — don't miss the contrast of that moment.
- The second movement consists of a theme and five variations (repetitions of the same theme with changes of rhythm · tempo · mood). Follow how the unhurried theme first heard in the woodwinds changes shape with each variation.
- The third movement begins with the bassoons and the strings' pizzicato (plucking the strings with the fingers instead of the bow) playfully setting out the theme. The broad, lyrical melody that appears midway is the concerto's hidden song.
- A 1932 recording survives in which the composer himself plays the piano with the London Symphony Orchestra. His own brisk, dry interpretation is a good benchmark against today's more flamboyant performances.
V. Thirteen years in Paris · 1923–1936 (age 32–45)
(Home) The couple settled in Paris right after their marriage; their elder son, Sviatoslav, was born in 1924, and their younger son, Oleg, in 1928. At the end of 1924 his mother, who had raised him and followed him into exile, died in Paris. Around the same time the couple became deeply drawn to Christian Science, a religious movement that had begun in America. He never let go of this faith, which teaches that sickness and evil are shadows cast by the mind, and his diaries are crowded with the questions and answers he argued out with himself over its doctrine. (Rivalry) At the center of Parisian musical life stood Stravinsky. In private Prokofiev belittled his neoclassicism as an imitation of old styles, and Stravinsky for his part thought little of Prokofiev's music. Still, the two never broke off contact. Prokofiev brought out in turn the Symphony No. 2, which he himself called music ‘made of iron and steel’; the ballet Le pas d'acier, a portrait of the machine age; and The Prodigal Son, which crowned Diaghilev's final season. With Diaghilev's death in 1929 he lost his greatest patron in the West. (Daily life) His income from concert tours was ample, and he drove a car and indulged in flashy ties and clothes. Yet as a composer he could never shake the sense that in Paris he was always in second place. (Homecoming) His 1927 concert tour of the Soviet Union met with a rapturous welcome, and from the early 1930s he shuttled between Moscow and Paris. In 1935 he wrote the ballet Romeo and Juliet for the Bolshoi Theatre, but the theatre postponed it on the grounds that it was too hard to dance. A few months after Pravda attacked Shostakovich's opera in January 1936, he moved his family permanently to Moscow. Scholars believe that homesickness, a longing for Russian audiences and the hunger for first place all played their part.
Written for the Bolshoi Theatre ahead of his return home, it was shelved on the grounds that it was too hard to dance, and was first staged in 1938 in Brno, Czechoslovakia.
- In “Dance of the Knights” (Montagues and Capulets), the brass and strings repeat a rhythm that pairs long and short notes into a heavy, clipped tread (dotted rhythm). The might and arrogance of the two houses are carried in that tread.
- In the middle section of the same piece, the flute sings a frail, tentative melody. It is the scene of Juliet dancing with her fiancé Paris, set against the ponderous march before and after.
- In “Juliet as a Young Girl,” the strings dart about until the clarinet and flute bring out a shy melody. This melody becomes Juliet's theme, deepening as the drama unfolds.
- In “Death of Tybalt,” after Romeo stabs Tybalt, the whole orchestra hammers the same chord again and again. It is one of the most violent scenes in all ballet music.
- In the original 1935 version, Romeo arrived in time and the two lovers survived. After criticism, it was rewritten as a tragedy, true to Shakespeare; the original version was reconstructed and staged by scholars in the 2000s.
VI. The return to Moscow · 1936–1945 (age 45–54)
(Fairy tale) In the spring of 1936 he wrote “Peter and the Wolf” on commission from the Central Children's Theater, led by Natalia Sats. With this piece, for which he even wrote the narration himself, he introduced children to the instruments of the orchestra one by one. For a father raising two sons, it was a joy. (Terror) In 1938 he made “Alexander Nevsky” with the film director Sergei Eisenstein, and the following year he reworked its music into a cantata. That same winter, after he returned from a concert tour of America and Europe, his passport was taken from him, and he never again crossed the border. In 1939 the director Meyerhold, with whom he was preparing the opera “Semyon Kotko,” was arrested, and he was executed the following year. That same year Prokofiev wrote “Zdravitsa,” a cantata honoring Stalin's sixtieth birthday. (Mira) In 1938, at the resort of Kislovodsk, he met Mira Mendelson, a literature student twenty-four years his junior, and fell in love; in the spring of 1941 he left Lina and their two sons. Mira remained at his side thereafter, co-writing the libretto of the opera “War and Peace.” (Evacuation) When the German-Soviet war broke out, he moved from Nalchik to Tbilisi, Alma-Ata, and Perm, writing “War and Peace,” the ballet “Cinderella,” and Piano Sonata No. 7. He called Symphony No. 5, written in the summer of 1944, a symphony glorifying the grandeur of the human spirit. The pianist Richter recalled that at its Moscow premiere in January 1945, as Prokofiev raised his baton, artillery salutes boomed to announce a victory. Shortly afterward he fainted, fell, and injured his head; from then on, high blood pressure and headaches left him with doctors limiting the hours he could work each day.
A musical fairy tale from the year he returned to Moscow, commissioned by a children's theater; he even wrote the narration himself to introduce children to the orchestra.
- Before the story proper, the narrator introduces each character paired with an instrument. The bird is the flute, the duck the oboe, the cat the clarinet, the grandfather the bassoon, the wolf three horns, Peter the string section, and the hunters' gunshots the timpani and bass drum.
- In the scene where the duck and the bird quarrel, the oboe's waddling melody and the flute's chattering, rapid figures trade back and forth, cutting each other off.
- As the cat creeps closer, the clarinet plays short, detached notes (staccato) in its low register. It sounds like a cat walking on tiptoe.
- Listen closely in the final march and you will hear the oboe melody of the duck, swallowed by the wolf, sounding from inside the wolf's belly. It is a small consolation the composer left behind.
A symphony that the composer, in the midst of war, said glorified the grandeur of the human spirit. A fall soon after the premiere cost him much of his health.
- The opening theme of the 1st movement is sung together by flute and bassoon, two octaves apart. High and low voices share a single melody, creating a broad, composed first impression.
- In the closing section (coda) of the 1st movement, the full orchestra is joined by bass drum and even a tam-tam, a gong-like instrument, and the sound swells to enormous size. It sounds like the weight of war.
- In the 2nd movement, a scherzo (a fast, playful movement), the violins repeat short notes relentlessly, like a machine, while the clarinet lays a mischievous melody on top.
- In the 3rd movement, an adagio (slowly), a long melody gradually darkens until it reaches a tragic climax. Let us listen to how the darkness of this movement connects with the bright dash of the 4th movement.
- Richter recalled that at the premiere in January 1945, as the composer stepped onto the podium, victory salutes thundered. It is a scene that shows what this work meant to Soviet audiences at the end of the war.
VII. Death on the same day · 1945–1953 (age 54–62)
(Branded) In February 1948 a resolution of the Communist Party Central Committee named him, along with Shostakovich, Myaskovsky, Khachaturian, and others, as a ‘formalist.’ Many of his works vanished from concert programs, and he had to write a public apology. The opera he presented that year, “The Story of a Real Man,” was also condemned. (Lina) That same month Lina was arrested on charges of espionage, given a 20-year sentence, and sent to a labor camp. Earlier, a Soviet court had ruled that their 1923 marriage in Germany was void because it had never been registered in the Soviet Union, and in January 1948 Prokofiev had formally married Mira. Lina was not released until 1956, after Stalin's death. Of the two sons, who spent their youth without their mother, Sviatoslav became an architect and Oleg a painter. (Cello) When his income all but dried up, the young cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, by some accounts, pleaded with the Composers' Union on his behalf. Every summer Rostropovich stayed at his dacha in Nikolina Gora, polishing the Cello Sonata and the “Symphony-Concerto” with him. In 1950 his lifelong friend Myaskovsky died. (The end) The premiere of Symphony No. 7 in October 1952 was his last public appearance. On the evening of March 5, 1953, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his Moscow apartment. Less than an hour later, Stalin died. With the whole city bound up in Stalin's funeral, no flowers could be found, and even moving the coffin was difficult. His obituary appeared in the newspapers, briefly, only days later. He was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery, and Mira put his papers in order until her own death in 1968.
His last symphony, written amid criticism and illness; its premiere in October 1952 became his last public appearance.
- The second theme of the 1st movement is a broad, warm melody sung at length by the strings and woodwinds. It sounds like the longing he carried in his last years.
- The 2nd movement is a waltz. It holds the craft of a composer who loved writing waltzes for ballet and opera, so follow the swaying flow of its 3-beat pulse.
- At the end of the 4th movement, after the lyrical theme of the 1st movement returns, the original ending has the xylophone and glockenspiel (a small keyboard percussion instrument of struck metal bars) ticking like the second hand of a clock before quietly fading away.
- Urged by those around him, who had the Stalin Prize jury in mind, the composer added a separate fast, brilliant ending. He is said to have told Rostropovich that he hoped the quiet ending would survive. Which ending to choose is where conductors part ways.
Lesser-known stories
Among musicians he was a chess player of rare strength. At a simultaneous exhibition in Petersburg in 1914 he defeated Capablanca, the future world champion, and in 1937 he played a public match in Moscow against the violinist David Oistrakh. Music biographies usually pass over this briefly as a mere hobby, yet his temperament, calculating moves in advance and relentless about winning, resembled his habits as a composer. From 1907 to 1933 he kept a vast diary. He had a peculiar habit of writing words in consonants alone, dropping the vowels, so that even his own name was abbreviated. In the Soviet years only a tidy official autobiography was known; the diary was not published until 2002, by his son Sviatoslav, in Paris. The man in the diary is far more arrogant, funnier, and more anxious than the man of the autobiography. That he had been a Christian Scientist since the 1920s also long remained hidden. In the Soviet Union, where religion could not be professed openly, it could not be mentioned; only after the diary and letters were made public did it become widely known, through scholars such as Simon Morrison. How this faith, which saw illness as a matter of the mind, helped him endure the sickness of his last years is still being examined by researchers.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Cadenza
(Meaning) The Italian cadenza comes from a word meaning ‘to fall, to come to a close.’ The name arose because, just before a piece reached its close, the soloist would display their skill alone at the point where the orchestra stopped. (In music) In a concerto, the passage the soloist plays alone while the orchestra rests. In the past performers filled it with improvisation, but increasingly composers, like Prokofiev, wrote it out themselves. Like the moment in a soccer match when everyone stands still as one player takes a free kick, it is the passage where every eye and ear turns to a single person. (Elsewhere) The English ‘cadence,’ from the same root, is also used in cycling for how many times the pedals turn in 1 minute.
Neoclassicism
(Meaning) The word sin-gojeonjuui ('new classicism') means a new (新) classicism; the name itself carries the idea of reviving the old classics in a new way. (In music) A movement in which early 20th-century composers took up again the forms and lean textures of the Baroque·Classical era and rewrote them with modern harmony and rhythm. Stravinsky is its leading figure, and Prokofiev's “Classical” Symphony is counted as an earlier example. Think of an old children's song newly arranged for today's instruments and rhythms: the tune is familiar, yet somehow strange and new. (Elsewhere) In art and architecture, it refers to the late 18th-century movement that revived ancient Greek·Roman styles.
Gavotte
(Meaning of the word) The name is said to come from a dance of the ‘Gavots,’ a people who lived in the Alpine region of southeastern France. (In music) A dance that was fashionable at the French court in the 17th and 18th centuries. It usually has four beats to a measure, and it is distinctive for beginning not on the first beat of the measure but in the middle. Just as you might hop into a long jump rope your friends are swinging somewhere midway through the beat, the gavotte starts its dance right in the middle of the beat.
Scherzo
(Meaning of the word) In Italian it means ‘joke, jest.’ (In music) A quick, lively and playful movement in a symphony · sonata · concerto. After Beethoven, it increasingly took the place of the minuet, a more leisurely dance. Like a break between long classes, it lets you catch your breath between weightier movements while brimming with mischief.
Pizzicato
(Meaning of the word) It comes from the Italian pizzicare (to pinch, to pluck). The name itself carries the idea of a way of playing in which the string is plucked as if pinched. (In music) A technique in which string instruments such as the violin · cello are sounded by plucking the strings with the fingers instead of drawing a bow across them. Because the sound is short and bouncy, it is often used to create a playful or cautious mood. Think of the ‘twang’ you hear when you flick a tightly stretched rubber band with your finger.
Variations
(Meaning of the word) Byeonjugok means a piece that is changed (變) as it is played (奏). (In music) A form in which a single theme is first presented and then repeated several times with its rhythm · harmony · tempo · instruments · mood altered. Even as it changes, the skeleton of the theme remains, so the listener recognizes it — ‘Ah, it’s that melody.’ It is much like singing the same song as a chorus at the school recital, fast as a cheer at field day, and slow as a lullaby, and it is still the same song.
Cantata
(Meaning of the word) The word comes from the Italian cantare (to sing) and means ‘a piece that is sung.’ It is the counterpart of the sonata, whose name means a piece that ‘sounds’ on instruments. (In music) A vocal work that weaves several pieces for chorus · soloists and orchestra into a single whole. In Bach’s time many were written for church services, but some, like Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky,” were reworked from film music. Picture a school recital where the whole class sings one song after another following a single story.