Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeevich Prokofiev (in Russian Серге́й Серге́евич Проко́фьев; Sontsovka, April 11Jul. / April 23, 1891greg.-Moscow, March 5, 1953), known as Sergei Prokofiev, was a Soviet composer, pianist and conductor. As the creator of recognized masterpieces in numerous musical genres, he is considered one of the leading composers of the XX century. His works include such popular pieces as the march of The Love of the Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet, from which the "Dance of the Knights" and Peter and the Wolf are taken. Within the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created seven complete operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, one cello concerto, one symphonic concerto for cello and orchestra, and nine sonatas for piano completed.
A graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev initially became known as an iconoclastic composer-pianist and achieved notoriety with a series of fiercely dissonant and virtuoso works for his instrument, including his first two piano concertos. In 1915 Prokofiev made a decisive break from the standard composer-pianist category with his orchestral Scythian Suite, compiled from music originally composed for a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev commissioned three other ballets from Prokofiev: The Jester, The Iron Step and The Prodigal Son, which at the time of their original production caused sensation among critics and colleagues. However, Prokofiev's main interest was opera and he composed several works in that genre, including The Gambler and The Angel of Fire. Prokofiev's only operatic success during his lifetime was Love for Three Oranges, composed for the Chicago Opera and subsequently performed over the next decade in Europe and Russia.
After the 1917 Revolution, Prokofiev left Russia with the official blessing of Soviet Minister Anatoli Lunacharsky and resided in the United States, then Germany, then Paris, earning a living as a composer, pianist, and conductor.. During that time, he married a Spanish singer, Carolina (Lina) Codina, with whom he had two children. In the early 1930s, the Great Depression diminished opportunities for Prokofiev's ballets and operas to be performed in the United States and Western Europe. Prokofiev, who regarded himself first and foremost as a composer, resented the time it took him to tour as a pianist, turning increasingly to the Soviet Union for commissions for new music. In 1936, he finally returned to his homeland with his family. He enjoyed some success there, especially with Lieutenant Kijé , Peter and the Wolf , Romeo and Juliet , and perhaps above all with Alexander Nevsky .
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union prompted him to compose his most ambitious work, an operatic version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. In 1948, Prokofiev was accused of producing "undemocratic formalism." Despite that accusation, he enjoyed the personal and artistic support of a new generation of Russian performers, notably Sviatoslav Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich: he wrote his Ninth Piano Sonata for the former and his Sinfonia Concertante for the second.
Biography
Childhood and early compositions
Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891, in Sontsovka (now Sontsivka, Pokrovsk Raion, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine), a remote country estate in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father, Sergei Alexeyevich Prokofiev, was an agronomist. Prokofiev's mother, Maria Grigorievna (née Zhitkova), came from a family of former serfs who had been owned by the Sheremetev family, under whose patronage serf children were taught drama and arts from an early age. Reinhold Glière (Prokofiev's first composition teacher) described her as "a tall woman with beautiful intelligent eyes... who knew how to create an atmosphere of warmth and simplicity about her". After their wedding in the summer of 1877, the Prokofiev moved to a small estate in the Smolensk Governorate. Eventually, Sergei Alexeyevich found employment as a civil engineer, employed by one of his former classmates, Dmitri Sontsov, to whose property in the Ukrainian steppes the Prokofievs moved.
At the time of Prokofiev's birth, Maria, who had previously lost two daughters, had dedicated her life to music. During his son's early childhood, he spent two months a year in Moscow or Saint Petersburg receiving piano lessons. Sergei Prokofiev was inspired by listening to his mother practicing the piano at night, mostly works by Frédéric Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven, and wrote his first piano composition at the age of five, an Indian Gallop, which his mother wrote in a major scale with a raised fourth scale degree, as the young Prokofiev felt " reluctance to tackle black notes." At the age of seven he had also learned to play chess. Chess would remain a passion of his and he became acquainted with world chess champions such as José Raúl Capablanca, whom he defeated in a game simultaneous exhibition on May 16, 1914, and Mikhail Botvinnik, with whom he played several games in the 1930s. At the age of nine his father took him to Moscow for the first time, where in addition to being impressed by the city, or visit the circus, q He was fascinated by the theater, especially by the interpretation of the symphony orchestra. Upon his return, together with his friends he began to play representing his own works, and one day he composed his first opera, El Gigante, and despite his mother's initial disbelief, he managed to complete the piano music, along with the improvised dialogues with his companions. It was a simple, but brilliant story about two brave young men who defended a damsel against the danger of a terrible giant. A short time later, at his uncle's house and with the collaboration of his cousins and his aunt, who even dressed up for the occasion, he represented the first act of his opera in the living room of the home, to the astonishment of his parents and family. By then he had already composed that opera, as well as an overture and other pieces, and was immersed in writing a second and larger opera entitled Desert Islands. At that time his parents decided to provide their son with an edu stronger education, with hard work and discipline, beginning with French and German lessons.
Formal education and controversial early works
In 1902, Prokofiev's mother met Sergei Taneyev, director of the Moscow Conservatory, who initially suggested that Prokofiev should begin piano and composition classes with Aleksandr Goldenweiser. Unable to arrange this, Taneyev instead arranged for the composer and pianist Reinhold Glière to spend the summer of 1902 in Sontsovka teaching Prokofiev. The first series of lessons culminated, at the insistence of the then eleven-year-old Prokofiev, with the budding composer making his first attempt at writing a symphony The following summer, Glière revisited Sontsovka to continue his classes. When, decades later, Prokofiev wrote about his lessons with Glière, he credited his teacher's sympathetic method, but complained that Glière had taught him the "square" phrase structure and conventional modulations, which he subsequently had to unlearn. Equipped, however, with the necessary theoretical tools, Prokofiev began to experiment with dissonant harmonies and unusual time signatures in a series of short piano pieces that he called "songs" (from the so-called "song form", more precisely ternary form, on which they were based), laying the foundations for his own musical style.
Despite his growing talent, Prokofiev's parents were hesitant to initiate their son into a musical career at such an early age and considered the possibility of his attending a good secondary school in Moscow. In 1904, his mother moved away. she had decided instead on Saint Petersburg and she and Prokofiev visited the then-capital to explore the possibility of moving there for her education. They were introduced to the composer Aleksandr Glazunov, a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, who asked to meet Prokofiev and his music.. Prokofiev had composed two more operas, Desert Islands and The Feast in the Time of the Plague, and was working on his fourth, Undina. Glazunov was so impressed that he urged Prokofiev's mother to have her son apply to the Conservatory. He passed the introductory tests and enrolled that year.
Several years younger than most of his classmates, Prokofiev was seen as eccentric and arrogant, and annoyed several of his peers by keeping statistics on their mistakes. During this period, he studied, among others, with Aleksandr Winkler to piano; Anatoli Lyadov for harmony and counterpoint; Nikolai Cherepnin for direction; and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for orchestration (although when Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908, Prokofiev noted that he had only studied with him "in some way"—he was just one of many students in a crowded class—and lamented that otherwise " I would never have had the opportunity to study with him"). He also shared classes with composers Boris Asafiev and Nikolai Miaskovsky, the latter becoming a relatively close and lifelong friend.
As a member of the St. Petersburg music scene, Prokofiev developed a reputation as a musical rebel, while receiving acclaim for his original compositions, which he himself performed on the piano. In 1909, he graduated from his class in composition with unimpressive ratings. He continued at the Conservatory, studying piano with Annette Essipoff and continued his conducting classes with Cherepnín.
In 1910, with the death of his father, financial support for Sergei ceased. Fortunately, he had begun to make a name for himself as a composer and pianist outside the Conservatoire and made appearances at Nights of Contemporary Music from Saint Petersburg. There he performed several of his most adventurous piano works, such as his highly chromatic and dissonant, Etudes op. 2 (1909). His performance impressed the organizers of the Evenings enough to invite Prokofiev to perform the Russian premiere of Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, by Arnold Schönberg. Prokofiev's harmonic experimentation continued with Sarcasms for Piano, Op. 17 (1912), which made extensive use of polytonality. At this time he composed his first two piano concertos, the last of which caused a scandal at its premiere (23 August 1913, Pavlovsk). According to one version, the audience left the room with exclamations of “To hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!", but the modernists were ecstatic.
In 1911, help came from the renowned Russian musicologist and critic Aleksandr Ossovsky, who wrote a letter of support to the music publisher Boris P. Jurgenson (son of the publisher's founder Peter Jurgenson) and thus was offered a contract to the composer. Prokofiev made his first trip abroad in 1913, he went to Paris and London, where he first met Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
Early ballets
In 1914 Prokofiev finished his career at the Conservatory by participating in the "battle of the pianos", a competition open to the five best piano students, whose prize was a Schreder grand piano: Prokofiev won by playing his own Piano Concerto No. 1. His early works, such as said concerto and the Scythian Suite for orchestra (1914), earned him a bad reputation as a musician, as they did not correspond with the Russian nationalist line.
Shortly after, he traveled to London, where he made contact with the businessman Sergei Diaghilev. Prokofiev commissioned his first ballet, Ala y Lolli, but when the composer brought the work in progress to Italy in 1915, he rejected it as "non-Russian". As compensation, they arranged for Prokofiev to perform a performance of his Second Piano Concerto at a symphony concert in Rome on March 17, in what was his first performance abroad. The final theme of the Second Concerto It showed that Prokofiev was no stranger to Russian themes, so Diaghilev urged him to write "music that was truly Russian" and commissioned the ballet The Jester. Under the guidance of Diaghilev, Prokofiev chose his subject from a collection of folk tales compiled by ethnographer Aleksandr Afanasiev. The story, involving a jester and a series of deceptions, had previously been suggested to Diaghilev by Igor Stravinsky as a possible subject for a ballet and Diaghilev and his choreographer Léonide Massine helped Prokofiev shape it into a ballet script. The i The composer's experience with this genre led him to revise the work extensively up to 1920, following Diaghilev's detailed critique, before its first production.
The ballet's premiere in Paris on May 17, 1921 was a great success and was received with great admiration by an audience that included Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel and Michel Fokine. Stravinsky called the ballet "the only piece of modern music that I could listen to with pleasure", while Ravel called it "a work of genius".
World War I and Revolution
In parallel during World War I, Prokofiev returned to the Conservatory and studied organ to avoid being drafted. He composed The Gambler, an opera based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name, but the rehearsals were plagued with problems and the premiere, scheduled for 1917, had to be canceled due to the February Revolution. In the summer of that year, Prokofiev composed his First Symphony, the “Classical”. This is the name he gave it himself, since he composed it in a style that, according to Prokofiev, Joseph Haydn would have used if he were alive at the time.It is more or less classical in style, but incorporates more modern musical elements.
The symphony was also an exact contemporary work of the Violin Concerto No. 1, which was scheduled for its premiere in November 1917. He composed the concerto's opening melody in 1915, during its history of love with Nina Mescherskaya. The remaining movements were inspired in part by the 1916 Saint Petersburg performance of Karol Szymanowski's Myths by Polish violinist Paul Kochanski. The first performances of both works had to wait until April 21. of 1918 and October 18, 1923, respectively. He briefly stayed with his mother in Kislovodsk, in the Caucasus.
Despite the events that led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and eventually the October Revolution, 1917 became Prokofiev's most productive year in terms of composition. Along with the First Violin Concerto and the “Classical” Symphony, he composed the Third and Fourth Piano Sonatas, the Fugitive Visions for piano and worked on the Third Piano Concerto.
After completing the score for the cantata Seven, They Are Seven, a "Chaldean Invocation" for chorus and orchestra, Prokofiev was left "with nothing to do and time hanging heavily on my hands ». Believing that in Russia "there was no use for music at that time," he decided to try his luck in America until the turmoil in his homeland had passed. He left for Moscow and Saint Petersburg in March 1918 to settle financial matters and arrange for his passport. In May he went to the United States, after obtaining official permission from Anatoli Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar for Education, who told him: " You are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in life. We must work together. If you want to go to America, I won't stand in your way."
Life abroad
Arriving in San Francisco after being released from interrogation by immigration officials on Angel Island on August 11, 1918, Prokofiev was soon compared to other famous Russian exiles (such as Sergei Rachmaninov). His debut solo concert in New York led to several more engagements. He also signed a contract with the music director of the Chicago Opera Association, Cleofonte Campanini, for the production of his new opera The Love of the Three Oranges. However, due to the illness and death of Campanini, the premiere was postponed. The delay was another example of Prokofiev's bad luck in operatic matters. The failure also cost him his career as an American soloist, as the opera took too much time and effort. He soon found himself in financial difficulties and, in April 1920, he left for Paris, not wanting to return to Russia and acknowledging failure.
In Paris he reaffirmed his contacts with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also completed some of his oldest and unfinished works, such as the Third Piano Concerto. The Love of Three Oranges finally gave its Chicago premiere, under the composer's baton, on December 30, 1921. Diaghilev became sufficiently interested in the opera to ask Prokofiev to give an audition of the vocal score in June 1922, while they were both in Paris for a new cut of The Jester, so he might consider it for a possible production. Igor Stravinsky, who was present at the audition, refused to listen to more than the first act. He then accused Prokofiev of "wasting time composing operas", who replied that Stravinsky "was not in a position to set a general artistic direction, since he himself is not immune from error". According to Prokofiev, Stravinsky " became incandescent with anger" and "almost came to blows and parted with difficulty". As a result, "our relations became strained and for several years Stravinsky's attitude towards me was critical". After that, Stravinsky seems to have done much to undermine Prokofiev's reputation, including with Diaghilev himself. Due to the success of The Jester, Diaghilev no longer commissioned Prokofiev and canceled performances of the ballet.
In March 1922 Prokofiev moved with his mother to the town of Ettal in the Bavarian Alps, where for over a year he concentrated on an opera project, The Angel of Fire, Based on the novel by Valery Briusov. His later music had acquired a following in Russia and he received invitations to return there, but he decided to stay in Europe. In 1923 Prokofiev married the Spanish singer Carolina Codina (stage name Lina Llubera) of a Russian mother, before returning to Paris.
Several of his works, including the Second Symphony, were performed in Paris, but their reception was lukewarm and Prokofiev felt it was "obviously no longer a sensation". Second Symphony seemed to prompt Diaghilev to commission The Steel Step, a “modernist” ballet score intended to portray the industrialization of the Soviet Union. The work was enthusiastically received by the Parisian public and critics.
Around 1924 he was introduced to Christian Science and began to practice its teachings, which he believed to be beneficial to his health and fiery temper, and to which he remained faithful for the rest of his life, according to biographer Simon Morrison.
Prokofiev and Stravinsky re-established their friendship, although Prokofiev particularly disliked Stravinsky's "Bach-like stylization" in works as recent as the Octet and Concerto for Piano and Instruments of wind. For his part, Stravinsky described Prokofiev as the Russian composer of his time, after him.
First visits to the Soviet Union
In 1927 Prokofiev made his first concert tour of the Soviet Union. Over the course of more than two months, he spent time in Moscow and Leningrad (the new name for Saint Petersburg), where he enjoyed a very successful performance staged The Love of the Three Oranges at the Mariinsky Theatre. In 1928 he completed his Third Symphony, which was largely based on his unreleased opera The Angel of fire. Conductor Sergei Kusevitsky characterized the Third as "the greatest symphony since Tchaikovsky's Sixth".
Meanwhile, however, Prokofiev, under the influence of Christian Science teachings, had turned against the expressionist style and theme of The Angel of Fire. he called a "new simplicity", which he believed to be more sincere than the "tricks and complexities" of so much modern music of the 1920s. During the years 1928 and 1929, Prokofiev composed what was to be his last ballet for Diaghilev, The prodigal son. When it was first performed in Paris on May 21, 1929, choreographed by George Balanchine, with Serge Lifar in the title role and sets by Georges Rouault, audiences and critics were particularly impressed by the final scene in which the prodigal son crawls across the stage on his knees to be welcomed by his father. Diaghilev had acknowledged that in the music of the scene, Prokofiev "had never been clearer, simpler, more melodious and more tender". Only a few months later, Diaghilev died.
That summer Prokofiev completed the Divertimento op. 43 (which he had begun in 1925) and revised his Sinfonietta op. 5/48, a work begun in his days at the Conservatoire. In October of that year, he was in a car accident while driving his family back to Paris after their vacation: when the car overturned, Prokofiev was slightly injured. his left hand. Therefore, he was unable to perform in Moscow during his tour shortly after the accident, but was able to enjoy watching performances of his music from the audience. He also attended the Bolshoi Theater "audition" of his ballet The Step of steel and members of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) questioned him about the work: he was asked if the factory portrayed "a capitalist factory, where the worker is a slave, or a Soviet factory, where the worker is a slave." is the owner. If it is a Soviet factory, when and where did Prokofiev, who from 1918 to the present had been living abroad and came here for the first time in 1927 for two weeks [sic], examine it?” Prokofiev replied: "That refers to politics, not music, and therefore I will not answer." RAPM dogmatically condemned the ballet as a "flat and vulgar anti-Soviet anecdote, a counter-revolutionary composition bordering on fascism." The Bolshoi had no choice but to reject the ballet.
With his left hand healed, Prokofiev toured the United States successfully in the early 1930s, buoyed by his recent European success. That year, he began his first ballet without Diaghilev with On the Dnieper op. 51, a work commissioned by Serge Lifar, who had been appointed ballet master at the Paris Opera.Between 1931 and 1932, he completed his Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos . The following year he completed the Symphonic Song op. 57, of which his friend Myaskovsky, thinking of his possible audience in the Soviet Union, told him "it's not quite for us...it lacks what we mean by monumentalism: a familiar simplicity and sweeping outlines, of which you are." extremely capable, but which you are temporarily carefully avoiding."
In the early 1930s, both Europe and the United States were suffering from the Great Depression, which inhibited both new opera and ballet productions, though audiences for Prokofiev's appearances as a pianist had not diminished, at least in Europe. However, Prokofiev, who saw himself as a composer first and foremost, became increasingly resentful of the amount of time he wasted composing through his appearances as a pianist. Having felt homesick for some time Prokofiev began to build substantial bridges with the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the RAPM in 1932, he increasingly acted as a musical ambassador between his native country in Western Europe, and premieres and commissions from him were increasingly under the auspices of the Soviet Union. One of them was Lieutenant Kijé, which was commissioned as the soundtrack for a Soviet film.
Another commission, from the Kirov Theater (as the Mariinsky was then called) in Leningrad, was the ballet Romeo and Juliet, composed for a script created by Adrián Piotróvsky and Sergei Radlov following the precepts of « drambalet" (dramatized ballet, officially promoted at the Kirov to replace works based primarily on exhibition and choreographic innovation). Following Radlov's bitter resignation from the Kirov in June 1934, a new agreement was signed with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, with the understanding that Pyotrovsky would continue to participate. However, the ballet's original happy ending (contrary to William Shakespeare) sparked controversy among Soviet cultural officials. The ballet's production was postponed indefinitely when the Bolshoi staff was reviewed at the behest of the Chairman of the Art Affairs Commission, Plato Kérzhentsev. Nikolai Myaskovsky, one of his closest friends, mentioned in several letters how he would like Prokofiev to remain in Russia. On December 1, 1935, the Violin Concerto No. 2 was premiered. > in Madrid by the French violinist Robert Soetens and the Madrid Symphony Orchestra conducted by Enrique Fernández Arbós.
Return to Russia
In 1936, Prokofiev and his family settled permanently in Moscow, after commuting between Moscow and Paris for the previous four years. That year he composed one of his most famous works, Peter and the Wolf, for the Central Theater for Children by Natalia Sats. It is a programmatic work for narrator, individual instruments and orchestra. Sats also persuaded him to write two children's songs, "Sweet Song" and "Talker", which were eventually joined with "The Little Pigs" and published as Three Children's Songs op. 68. Prokofiev also composed the gigantic Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, originally intended for performance during the anniversary year, but effectively blocked by Kérzhentsev, who complained at the audition of the work before the Committee on Arts Affairs: "What do you think you are doing, Sergei Sergeevich, taking texts that belong to the people and setting them to such incomprehensible music?" The Cantata had to wait until April 5, 1966 for a partial premiere, just over 13 years after the composer's death.
Forced to adapt to the new circumstances (whatever his private misgivings about them), Prokofiev wrote a series of "mass songs" (opp. 66, 79 and 89), using the lyrics of officially approved Soviet poets. In 1938, he collaborated with Sergei Eisenstein on the epic historical film Alexander Nevsky, some of his most creative and dramatic music. Although the film had a very poor sound recording, the composer adapted much of its score into a full-scale cantata for mezzo-soprano, orchestra, and chorus, which was extensively performed and recorded. Following the success of Alexander Nevsky , he composed the first Soviet opera by him, Semyon Kotko , which was to be produced by conductor Vsevolod Meyerhold. However, the opera's premiere was postponed because Meyerhold was arrested on June 20, 1939 by the NKVD (Joseph Stalin's secret police) and shot on February 2, 1940. Only months after Meyerhold's arrest, Prokofiev was “invited” to compose the cantata Zdrávitsa (literally translated “Toast” or “Cheers!”, but more often known by the English title Hail to Stalin op. 85) to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Joseph Stalin.
Later, in 1939, he composed his Piano Sonatas No. 6, 7 and 8 opp. 82-84, widely known today as the War Sonatas. Premiered respectively by Prokofiev (no. 6: April 8, 1940), Sviatoslav Richter (no. 7: Moscow, January 18, 1943) and Emil Guilels (no. 8: Moscow, December 30, 1944), were later widely performed in particular by Richter. Biographer Daniel Jaffé argued that Prokofiev, "having forced himself to compose a joyous evocation of the nirvana that Stalin wanted everyone to believe he had created" (i.e., in Zdrávitsa), later, in the three sonatas, "expressed his true feelings". As evidence, Jaffé has pointed out that the central movement of the Sonata No. 7 opens with a theme based on Robert Schumann's lied "Wehmut" ("Sadness which appears in Schumann's Liederkreis): his words translate, “Sometimes I can sing as if I were happy, but secretly tears are good and so they free my heart. The nightingales...sing their song of longing from the depths of their dungeon...everyone delights, but no one feels the pain, the deep sadness in the song." Ironically (no one seems to have noticed his allusion), the Sonata No. 7 received a Stalin Prize of the second class and the No. 8 a Stalin Prize of the first class.
Meanwhile, the Kirov Ballet finally staged Romeo and Juliet, choreographed by Leonid Lavrovski, on January 11, 1940. To the surprise of all its participants—with dancers who had struggled to get by with the syncopated rhythms of the music and nearly boycotted the production—the ballet was an immediate success, and was recognized as the greatest achievement of Soviet ballet drama.
World War II
Prokofiev had been thinking of making an opera of Leo Tolstoy's epic novel War and Peace, when news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 made the subject matter It seems even more current. It took him two years to compose his original version of War and Peace. Due to the war, he was evacuated along with a large number of other artists, initially to the Caucasus, where he composed his Second String Quartet . By now, his relationship with the 25-year-old writer and librettist Mira Mendelson (1915-1968) had finally led to his separation from his wife Lina. Despite their bitter separation from her, the composer had tried to persuade Lina and her children to accompany him as evacuees out of Moscow, but Lina chose to stay.
During the war years, restrictions on style and the requirement that composers write in a "socialist realist" style were loosened, and Prokofiev was generally able to compose in his own way. From that period are the Violin Sonata No. 1 op. 80, The year 1941 op. 90 and the Ballad for the Unknown Child op. 93. In 1943, Prokofiev joined Eisenstein in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan's largest city, to compose more film music (Ivan the Terrible for the film of the same name) and the ballet Cinderella. (op. 87), one of his most melodious and celebrated compositions. Earlier that year, he also played excerpts from War and Peace to the members of the Bolshoi Theater collective, but the Soviet government had views on the opera that led to many revisions. He also began a draft for another opera, Khan Buzay, which he abandoned. In 1944, Prokofiev composed his Fifth Symphony. in a composer's colony on the outskirts of Moscow. He conducted its premiere on January 13, 1945, just fifteen days after the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Piano Sonata on December 30, 1944 and, on the same day, the first part of Iván Eisenstein's Terrible. In those years, he also composed music for three other films, several symphonic suites, the String Quartet No. 2, the Sonata for Flute and Piano, a transcription of the herself for violin and piano (made at the behest of violinist David Óistraj), two military marches and a few folk songs.
With the premiere of his Fifth Symphony, which was programmed together with Peter and the Wolf and the Classical Symphony (conducted by Nikolai Anósov), Prokofiev seemed to reach the zenith of his fame as the Soviet Union's leading composer. Shortly thereafter, he suffered a concussion after a fall due to chronic hypertension. He never fully recovered from the injury and on medical advice he was forced to restrict his compositional activity.
Postwar
Prokofiev had time to write his post-war Sixth Symphony and his Ninth Piano Sonata (for Sviatoslav Richter) before the so-called “Zhdanov Decree”. In early 1948, after a meeting of Soviet composers convened by Andrei Zhdanov, the Politburo issued a resolution denouncing Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Nikolai Miaskovsky, and Aram Khachaturyan for the crime of "formalism," described as a "renunciation of the principles basics of classical music" in favor of "confused, anguishing" sounds that "turned the music into a cacophony". Eight of Prokofiev's works were banned: The Year 1941, Ode to the End of War, Festive Poem, Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, the Ballad of an Unknown Child, the 1934 piano cycle Los pensamientos and the Piano Sonata No. 6 and 8. Such was the perceived threat behind the ban on plays that even plays that had bypassed censorship were no longer scheduled: in August 1948, Prokofiev found himself in dire financial straits, his personal debt amounting to at 180,000 rubles.
On November 22, 1947, Prokofiev petitioned the court to initiate divorce proceedings against his estranged wife. Five days later, the court ruled that the marriage had no legal basis, as it had taken place in Germany and had not been registered with Soviet officials, making it null and void. After a second judge upheld the verdict, he and his partner Mira were married on January 13, 1948. On February 20, 1948, his ex-wife Lina was arrested for "espionage" as she had tried to send money to his mother in Spain. After nine months of interrogation, a three-member Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union sentenced her to twenty years of hard labor. After eight years there, she was finally released on June 30, 1956, and in 1974 she resigned. the Soviet Union.
Prokofiev's last opera projects, including his desperate attempt to appease the cultural authorities, The Story of a Real Man, were quickly canceled by the Kirov Theatre. The snub, in combination with his declining health, caused Prokofiev to withdraw progressively from public life and various activities, including his prized chess, and he turned increasingly to his own work. After a serious relapse in 1949, his doctors ordered him to limit his compositional activity to one hour a day.
In the spring of 1949, he wrote his Cello Sonata in C op. 119 for 22-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich, who gave the first performance in 1950, with Sviatoslav Richter. Prokofiev also extensively recomposed for Rostropovich his Cello Concerto, transforming it into a Sinfonia concertante i>, a milestone in the cello and orchestra repertoire today. The last public performance he attended was the premiere of his Seventh Symphony in 1952, his last masterpiece and last complete work and for which he received the Stalin Prize. The music was written for the Children's Radio Division.
Death
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Prokofiev died at the age of 61 on March 5, 1953, the same day as Joseph Stalin, when rehearsals for his ballet The Stone Flower (1950) had just begun. it premiered the following year. He had lived near Red Square and for three days crowds gathered to mourn Stalin, making it impossible to hold Prokofiev's funeral at the headquarters of the Union of Soviet Composers. Because the hearse could not get anywhere near the composer's home, his coffin had to be moved by hand through back streets in the opposite direction from the masses of people who were coming to visit Stalin's body. About thirty people attended the funeral, including Shostakovich. Although they did not seem to get along when they first met, in recent years their interactions had become much friendlier and Shostakovich wrote to Prokofiev that "I wish you at least another hundred years to live and create. Listening to works like your Seventh Symphony makes it much easier and more joyful to live.” He is buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.He was an atheist.
The Soviet press reported Prokofiev's death with a short article on page 116, while the first 115 pages were devoted to Stalin's death. Although the precise nature of Prokofiev's terminal illness remains uncertain, his death is generally attributed to a cerebral hemorrhage, as he had been chronically ill for the previous eight years.
Prokofiev's wife, Mira Mendelson, spent her last years living in the same Moscow apartment they had shared. She occupied her time organizing her husband's papers, promoting his music, and writing his memoirs, strongly encouraged by Prokofiev to embark on the latter. Working on her memoir was difficult for her; she left them incomplete at her death. Mendelssohn died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1968, 15 years after her husband's death. Inside her bag, a message dated February 1950 and signed by Prokofiev and Mendelssohn read simply: "We wish to be buried side by side." Her remains are buried together at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Lina Prokofiev outlived her estranged husband by many years and died in London in early 1989. The royalties from her late husband's music provided her with a modest income and she acted as narrator for a recording of Peter and her husband's wolf (released on CD by Chandos Records) with Neeme Järvi conducting the Scottish National Orchestra. Her sons, the architect Sviatoslav (1924-2010), and the artist, painter, sculptor and poet Oleg (1928-1998), dedicated a large part of their lives to promoting the life and work of her father..
Work
Compositions
Many of Prokofiev's works have long been classical, such as the Classical Symphony and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies; Piano Concertos No. 1 and No. 3 and Violin Concertos; Peter and the Wolf, the piano sonatas, the Flute Sonata and numerous sets of piano miniatures; his opera The Love of the Three Oranges and the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella ; or film music for Lieutenant Kijé and Alexander Nevsky. Other works have taken time, but have established themselves in the international repertoire: the first ballets, the operas War and Peace and The Angel of Fire, the other three piano concertos, string quartets and songs.
Stage music
Prokofiev's first attempt at composing an opera was at the age of nine. His operas include The Love of the Three Oranges, written in 1919 for Chicago, The Angel of Fire, The Gambler and War and Peace, based on Tolstoy's novel of the same name. Sergei Diaghilev rejected Prokofiev's first ballet score, Ala y Lolli, because he found the music outdated and the plot « hackneyed' and 'not Russian'. The composer recast some of the music as the Scythian Suite, but the projected ballet was never released. Diaghilev commissioned three other ballets from Prokofiev: The Jester, The Iron Step and The Prodigal Son, which at the time of their original production caused a sensation among critics and colleagues. The latter was performed for the first time in Paris in May 1929, three months before the impresario's death. Later ballets include Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella of 1944. Both the ballets and the first mentioned opera are known to concert audiences from the composer's own orchestral suites based on them.
Film music
After his return to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, Prokofiev began his involvement with the world of cinema. He composed the music for six films. The first of these was Lieutenant Kijé, by Aleksandr Faintsimmer, which he later transformed into an orchestral suite. He later composed the score for the soundtrack The Queen of Spades for the 1938 film of the same name, which was ultimately not released.
He later became friends with director Sergei Eisenstein. He collaborated with him on several films, the first of which was Alexander Nevsky (1938), the director's first sound film and which was used by the Stalin regime to reinforce its patriotic interests. composition is a work that has exerted a great influence on other great later composers of soundtracks, such as John Williams and James Horner.
On the so-called «war films» (Lermontov, 1941; Kotovski, 1942; Tonya, 1942; and Los Partisans in the Ukrainian Steppes, 1942), Kevin Bartig comments that none of them "were a major project for Prokofiev" and they were "among the most direct socialist realist themes he tackled in any genre". The composer himself acknowledged in a letter to his friend Miaskovsky that "film work is abundant, lucrative and does not require excessive artistic effort".
His next collaboration with Eisenstein was for the film Ivan the Terrible (Ivan the Terrible), which opened on December 30, 1944 and received a Stalin Prize. However, the second part of the film, Ivan the Terrible, Part Two: The Boyar Plot, finished in 1946, was censored by the Soviet authorities and could not be released until 1958. After this film, Prokofiev did not work for the cinema again.
Orchestral music
Prokofiev wrote seven symphonies, of which the "Classical" Symphony, written between 1916 and 1917 and based on the work of Joseph Haydn, is the best known. The Fifth Symphony of 1944 is a work on a much larger scale. The Third Symphony uses material from the opera The Angel of Fire, and the Fourth Symphony is based on the ballet The Prodigal Son.
Of his five piano concertos, the third is his best known, written in the composer's instantly recognizable musical language, from the incisive opening to the motoring rhythms that follow, in a blend of lyricism and biting wit. romantic in sentiment are the two violin concertos. His first Cello Concerto, completed in 1938, was followed 14 years later by his Cello Concertino , completed by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and composer Dmitri Kabalevsky later of Prokofiev's death.
Other compositions
Prokofiev's chamber music includes two sonatas for violin and piano, the second originally for flute and piano and revised by the composer with the assistance of violinist David Óistraj. He completed his Cello Sonata in C Major in 1949, but a second cello sonata remained unfinished at the time of his death. The Five Melodies for Violin and Piano, based on earlier songs, are also part of the general repertoire.He Wrote the Overture on Hebrew Themes in 1919, during a trip he made To united states.
He completed nine piano sonatas out of the eleven screened. His piano music also includes piano versions of music from the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella.Tales of an Old Grandmother was the first work of his composed abroad.
One of his best-known compositions is his children's story Peter and the Wolf, for narrator and orchestra. It is a simple educational work to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra, with instruments or groups of instruments that represent the characters of the story.
Recordings
Prokofiev was a soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Piero Coppola, in the first recording of his Piano Concerto No. 3, recorded in London by His Master's Voice in June 1932. He also recorded some of his solo piano music for HMV in Paris in February 1935; these recordings were released on CD by Pearl and Naxos.In 1938, he conducted the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in a recording of the second suite of his ballet Romeo and Juliet; this performance was later released on LP and CD. Another Prokofiev and Moscow Philharmonic recording was of the First Violin Concerto, with David Óistraj as soloist. Everest Records later released this recording on an LP. Despite the attribution, the director was Aleksandr Gauk. A short sound film of Prokofiev playing some of the music from his opera War and Peace and then explaining the music has been uncovered.
Legacy
During his lifetime, Prokofiev's works were widely performed, and after his death his popularity as a composer shows little sign of waning. Igor Stravinsky claimed that his music had "biological personality". Arthur Honegger proclaimed that Prokofiev " he would remain for us the greatest figure in contemporary music" and American musicologist Richard Taruskin has recognized Prokofiev's "gift, virtually unmatched among composers of the century XX, to write distinctively original diatonic melodies".
For some time, however, Prokofiev's reputation in the West suffered as a result of Cold War antipathies, and his music has never won from Western scholars and critics the kind of esteem enjoyed by Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schönberg., composers who are said to have had a greater influence on younger generations of musicians. Critical assessments of both the composer himself and his music have been "unusually polarized", due to the instability of the era in which he lived and the chronology of his travels. During the 20th century, criticism of him was often more political than artistic and relied on not only on the date of publication, but also on the writer's geographical location and social perspective. In contrast, with the publication of his autobiographical writings, Mira Mendelson's memoirs, his correspondence, and other bios spellings, light has been shed on many hidden facts about his career, his cultural context, his way of working and his personal life.
In popular culture
In addition to the music he composed for the movies, other works of his have been used in more than 150 films and TV shows. homeland of S. Prokofiev» is held annually in Donetsk and comprises four categories: solo piano, with orchestra, composition and symphonic conducting.
There are different locations named after Sergei Prokofiev. The composer was honored in his native Donetsk Oblast when Donetsk International Airport was renamed "Donetsk Sergei Prokofiev International Airport" and the Donetsk Musical and Pedagogical Institute was renamed "Donetsk SS Prokofiev State Academy of Music" in 1988. On Mercury there is an impact crater that receives his name in honor of the composer. In addition, since June 1, 1966, there is a museum in Moscow that bears his name. In 1991 and commemorating the centenary of the composer's birth, a monument was erected in front of him in his honor.
In 1985, Sting used a fragment of the theme "Romance" from the suite Lieutenant Kijé in his song "Russians", from the album The dream of the blue turtles.
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