Sergei Prokofiev, His Musical Life

YOU WILL ALSO BE INTERESTED IN Masters of Russian Music By M. D. Calvocoressi and Gerald Abraham Lively, scholarly, and authoritative portraits of fourteen Russian composers from Glinka and Dargomyjsky to Glazunof and Scriabin. My Musical Life By Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov A completely revised, re-edited, and reset edition of one of the most revealing and fruitful of composers' autobiographies. Dmitri Shostakovich By Victor Seroff The first biography in English of the world-famed young Soviet composer: personal, detailed, and authentic. Tchaikovsky By Herbert Weinstock The first complete biography of the Russian composer, based on new and revealing material. BORZOI BOOKS PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Sergei Prokofiev Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries http://archive.org/details/sergeiprokofievh1946nest (31 SERGEI eif) PROKOFIEV els His Musical Life BY ISRAEL V. NESTYEV Translated from the Russian by ROSE PROKOFIEVA Introduction by SERGEI EISENSTEIN ALFRED A. KNOPF : NEW YORK 1946 ft]L HlO 239034 Copyright 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce not more than three illustrations in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United States of America FIRST AMERICAN EDITION Preface i,.N writing this brief review of the life and work of Sergei Prokofiev, I have set myself the task not so much of making an exhaustive analysis of his music as of briefly reviewing the most significant of his works and of making a few cursory re- marks concerning the principal features of his style. The bulk of this book was written in 1941 to mark Proko- fiev's fiftieth birthday. After spending a year at the front I re- turned to Moscow on leave. During the time I spent in Mos- cow I was able to make a few additions dealing with Prokofiev's work during the war. I have freely drawn on the composer's Autobiography, written in 1941 for Sovietskaya Muzyka, on my own personal meet- ings with him, and on a large number of reviews published both in Russia and abroad. My acknowledgments are due to Nikolai Miaskovsky, Boris Asafyev (Igor Glebov), Konstantin S. Saradzhev, V. V. Derzhanovsky, V. M. Morolev, L. V. Niko- layev, N. E. Dobychina, Reinhold Gliere, and Abraham Spi- vakovsky, who have assisted me on a number of points of in- formation. My thanks are also due to Grigori Shneerson, who has helped me in going through the foreign press, and N. P. Shastin, who has provided me with some unpublished materials. I. V. N. Contents PACE Introduction by Sergei Eisenstein: P-R-K-F-V ix Introduction by the author xxi BOOK I. Early Years 1. Childhood 3 2. Years of Study 8 3. Recognition 22 4. Sturm und Drang 34 5. Style 59 BOOK II. Years of Wandering 6. Inertia of the Past 76 7. The Crisis 96 BOOK III. Soviet Artist 8. New Views 122 9. Composition 126 10. Maturity H3 11. The War Years 164 Catalogue of Prokofiev's Works 189 General Index FOLLOWS PAGE 193 Index of Prokofiev Compositions mentioned in text Vll P-R-K-F-V YcOU'LL have the music by noon. We leave the small projection-room. Although it is now midnight, I feel quite calm. At exactly 11.55 a.m. a small, dark blue automobile will come through the gate of the film studio. Sergei Prokofiev will emerge from the car. In his hands will be the necessarv piece of music. At night we look at the new sequence of film. By morning the new sequence of music will be ready for it. This is what happened recentlv when we worked on Alex- ander 'Se^'skx. And this happens now. as we work together on Ivan the Terrible. 1. Prokofiev works like a clock. This clock neither gains nor loses time. Like a sniper, it hits the verv heart of punctualitv. Proko- fiev's punctuality is not a matter of business pedantry. His exactness in time is a by-product of creative exactness. Of absolute exactness in musical imagerv. Of absolute exactness in transposing this imagerv into a mathematically exact means of expression, which Prokofiev has harnessed behind a bridle of hard steel. This is the exactness of Stendhal's laconic stvle translated into music. In crystal purity of expressive language Prokofiev is equaled only by Stendhal. Clarity of idea and purity of image, however, are not always sufficient to achieve the popular accessibility of a worn penny. A centurv ago Stendhal said: *7C mets un bUlet dans unc loterie dont le gros lot se reduit a ccci: ctrv lu en io;>"; although it is hard for us now to believe that there was once an ix P-R-K-F-V age that did not understand the transparency of Stendhal's style. Prokofiev is luckier. His works are not obliged to wait a hundred years. For many years he was not understood. Then he was accepted — as a curiosity. And only recently have they ceased to look askance at him. Now, both at home and abroad, Prokofiev has moved onto the broadest road of popular recognition. This process has been speeded by his contact with the cinema. Not merely because this contact popularized his creative work through the subjects, the large number of prints, or the wide accessibility of the screen. But because Prokofiev's being consists in something below the surface appearance of the film medium — something simi- lar to that which an event must undergo in being broken up for its passage through the film process. First, the event must pass through the lens, in order that, in the aspect of a film image, pierced by the blinding beam of the projection-machine, it may begin to lead a new and magic life of its own on the white surface of the screen. One can see the early Prokofiev in the pictures produced by the most extreme tendencies of modern painting. Occasionally he reminds one of the elegantly audacious Matisse. More often — of the early Picasso's harsh arrogance. Less often — of Rouault's frank coarseness. At the same time there is often something in him resembling the sculptured texture of a bas-relief. Fugitive Visions. Sarcasms. The Buffoon. Here, a jagged edge of tin; there, the oily coating on the lacquer of asphalt; here, the agonizing twists of a spiral, bounc- ing like a spring toward the observer. In their own various ways the "modern" painters sought, x P-R-K-F-V not a reflection of events, but a bared solution for the riddle of the structure of phenomena. They had to pay for their solution — with the sacrifice of the perceptible likeness of the object: all anecdotal quality in the object and all "integrated fact" gave way to the elements and their component parts, made tangible. The "city theme" is no longer an impressionist weaving of street sensations — now it becomes a conglomerate of citv elements: iron, a newspaper page, black letters, glass. And this was young Prokofiev's road. It was in vain that Henri Monnet in Cahiers dart waxed ironical over the music of Le Pas deader: "It evokes thunder with thunder, a hammer-blow with a hammer-blow: fine stvlization!" It was the verv lies of stvlization from which Prokofiev was consciously fleeing, as he sought the objectivitv of actual sounds. But alongside that irony, in the same issue of Cahiers dart (1927, No. 6), there is this comment on Picasso: "For Picasso painting is the skull of Yorick. He revolves it constantly in his hands, with intent curiosity" (Christian Zervos). Isn't Prokofiev doing the same thing? Though perhaps with this difference, that in his long hands he revolves, with no less curiosity, not the form of music, but its object. Not a skull, but a living face. At first, simple objects — "things" — looked at from the viewpoints of their texture, material, materialitv. structure. These become faces, which can be identified by their eye- lids, cheek-bones, crania. Later these grow into human images, composed of emotions (Romeo and Juliet), and, finally, thev develop into images that embodv pages of historv. images of phenomena, of social systems — collective images of the people. Thus the hoof-beats of the Teutonic knights in Alexander Nexsky do not merelv "hammer for the sake of hammering." but out of this "hammer for hammer" and "gallop for gallop" xi P-R-K-F-V there is evolved a universal image, galloping across the thir- teenth century to the twentieth — toward the unmasking of fascism. In this inner revelation of the spirit and nature of fascism, in this objectivization via fixed elements of tonal imagery, there is something akin to that period of modem painting when painters searched for the way to reveal the actuality of phenomena, through the physical composition of their materials — glass, wire, tin, or cardboard. This is another level. A difference in degree. In theme. For these solutions are no longer possible without social aim or without passion. 3- The Prokofiev of our time is a man of the screen. And he is related to the young Prokofiev very much as the motion-picture screen is related to the extreme searches of modem painting. One of those extreme seekers said cleverly: "Modem art has finally achieved suprematism — a black square and a white quadrangle." All that remained was for the quadrangle to become a screen.

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