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-Prokofiev, The diaries of a life
Like Stravinsky (his senior by ten years) and Shostakovich (his junior by fifteen), Prokofiev was a product of the Saint Petersburg (later Petrograd/Leningrad) Conservatoire and the city’s rich cultural life. This visit and the arduous journey across war-torn Europe are described in riveting detail in Prokofiev’s diaries. We learn how he became an enthralled if impatient member of the Diaghilev entourage in Rome, Naples, Capri, and Milan and how he forged a friendship with Stravinsky. He met the Italian Futurists F. T. Marinetti and Luigi Russolo, who demonstrated their newfangled intonarumori (noise machines), and in return Stravinsky and Prokofiev performed The Rite of Spring in a four-hand piano version “to stunning effect.” (Its composer was much impressed by Prokofiev’s sight-reading.) One might have expected Prokofiev to be disappointed when Diaghilev dismissed as “international” the music he had composed for Ala and Lolli, with a scenario by the Symbolist poet Sergey Gorodetsky on “Scythian” themes, but instead the composer eagerly adopted Diaghilev’s idea (borrowed from Stravinsky) of a theme taken from Alexander Afanasyev’s book Russian Folk Tales. (The material from Ala and Lolli was used for the Scythian Suite [1915].) The resulting work, Chout (The Buffoon), was written by the end of 1915 and eventually, with wars, revolutions, and revisions intervening, premiered in Paris in 1921.
Prokofiev had ambitions as a writer and said that, had he not been a composer, he would have become an author. (Over the years, he penned a handful of rather good short stories.) As Phillips explains in his insightful introduction, “The notion that both the exterior and interior circumstances of [Prokofiev’s] life were worthy of record took root early.” Prokofiev started his adult diary at the age of sixteen, when he was entering his fourth year at the Conservatoire. A firm belief in his destiny as a composer prompted him to chronicle everything that concerned his musical activities. But the diaries are also valuable for the context they provide. Prokofiev demonstrated an insatiable curiosity about the world and expressed his enthusiasms with keen intelligence and sharp wit. We discover here a love of nature (“I cannot go through a whole day without filling my lungs with fresh air”), a craze for astronomy, and a lifelong passion for chess.
Prokofiev’s evolution from a jaunty if somewhat prickly youth to a self-assured and suave young man is amply detailed. As he matured, he lost something of the enfant terrible’s desire to shock, while retaining a spontaneous and endearing natural charm. His awareness of his worth could appear to be arrogance; indeed, the twenty-three-year-old Prokofiev reported that his conducting teacher, Nikolai Tcherepnin, was “concerned by the unswerving self-confidence with which I was pursuing my own musical path. Self-confidence to the degree that I possess it was not, in his opinion, an appropriate concomitant to talent. Really?” The composer Nikolai Myaskovsky, a lifelong friend and supporter, saw behind the facade to the vulnerability in Prokofiev’s nature and once reprimanded him for an exaggerated susceptibility to criticism: “Is it possible that you are such a feeble, unbalanced musician and so little talented (in your own opinion) that one can’t say anything disapproving to you, but instead has to praise you indiscriminately?”
While he established an early reputation as a pianist-composer, Prokofiev soon demonstrated a great talent for stage drama. By the time he was thirty, he had conceived three major operas and completed two of them, writing both the libretto and the music. Not surprisingly, the vivid musical characterizations of his operatic works are echoed in the diaries’ sharply drawn vignettes of the many interesting people he encountered. His descriptions of such literary figures as the poets Igor Severyanin and Vladimir Mayakovsky are concise and apt. But for Prokofiev, the Olympian poet was Konstantin Balmont. He set Balmont’s poetry in two song cycles and composed a cantata called Seven, They Are Seven, based on the poet’s version of an ancient Chaldean incantation. Prokofiev described the poem as “one of the most fearsome things ever written” and was quite aware of its far-reaching implications: “Not for nothing have its enigmatic cuneiform hieroglyphs been brought out into the light after being buried in the ground for a thousand years, to resound once again, perhaps more apocalyptically even than before!” The year, after all, was 1917.
By his mid-twenties, Prokofiev had discovered the comforts of philosophy. In a diary entry for May 1917, he wrote of the profound effect of Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena: “This reading of Schopenhauer was a revelation to me, and may be described as an important stage in my life. For now I could stand firmly and consciously on my own two feet, finding an amazing and comprehensive balance that had so far eluded me. . . . I began in some sense to see everything that happened with greater clarity.” This clarity helped him in his decision to leave Russia in 1918 to seek his fortune in America.
Prokofiev began his departure from Russia toward the end of April 1918, and after a four-month journey across Siberia to Japan and Honolulu, he arrived in San Francisco. He made his base for the next two years in New York, but Chicago was the city that welcomed him more enthusiastically. By the end of the year, he had gained from the Chicago Opera a contract for The Love for Three Oranges.
Prokofiev’s affairs of the heart are chronicled with humor and irony. In America, he juggled romances with the actresses Stella Adler and Maria Baranovskaya and the wonderful if infuriating Nina Koshetz (his favorite singer). He also met a young half-Spanish student of singing named Carolina “Lina” Codina. Lina, or Ptashka, as he dubbed her, appealed to his protective interests through her innocence and passionate yet patient devotion. In August 1920, he set up house outside Paris with Lina and his mother, who, to his great relief, had arrived after a harrowing journey from Russia via Constantinople. Volume 2 of the diaries ends with his marriage to Lina in Bavaria in September 1923.
In an essay from Sergey Prokofiev and His World on the composer’s spirituality, conductor Leon Botstein remarks on the importance of Prokofiev’s embrace of Christian Science. He and Lina encountered the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy in 1924, and their devotion to the faith, with its definition of evil as a transient force and its perception of pain and suffering as illusory, offered them serenity. It also helped them disregard (if not come to terms with) the horrors of Soviet reality.
Prokofiev and his family transferred their residence to Moscow in 1936 on the understanding that he and his wife would be free to travel to the West to fulfill professional engagements. Leaving their children as hostages in Moscow, Lina and Sergey journeyed twice to America and France, but after 1938, the lid was clamped down on travel abroad. The pressures of their new life in Moscow were great, particularly for Lina, who found herself cut off from family and friends. Their marriage was already under stress when, in August 1938, Prokofiev met Mira, a young, earnest student of literature, who seduced him through her fierce devotion and natural charm. In 1941, Prokofiev moved in with Mira, and Lina found herself abandoned in a hostile environment. But worse was to come. When the composer came under fire in the 1948 attack on formalism in music, it was Lina who was arrested; being a foreigner and the ex-wife of a leading “formalist” was enough to earn her seven years in the camps. Prokofiev could do nothing to save her, yet his reticence to intervene remains an enigma.
From 1936 onward, he embarked on many important projects that never saw the light of day. These included music for theatrical productions of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1936) and Boris Godunov (1937) and the audacious Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October (1937). Works like the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1935–36), which was to become incredibly popular at home and abroad, and the brilliant opera Semyon Kotko (1939) had to overcome a series of grotesque obstacles before being staged. The grandiose opera War and Peace (1941–52), created in part as a reaction to the German invasion of Russia in 1941, was only performed in a truncated version during his lifetime. Prokofiev’s attempt at rehabilitation with a truly “Soviet” opera, A Story of a Real Man (194748), based on a novella by the socialist-realist writer Boris Polevoy, was shamefully suppressed by the auditioning bodies, a shocking instance of the abuse of power by cultural bureaucrats and of the fear that led his colleagues to betray him.
Prokofiev’s statement in defense of this work is sprinkled with ideological clichés through which glimmers his honest desire to create good music: “In my opera I tried to be as melodic as I could, tried to make the melodies as comprehensible as possible. . . . I was primarily concerned with disclosing Soviet man’s internal world, his love for the Motherland, and Soviet patriotism. It was hard for me to hear the negative reactions of my comrades.” Rostropovich often recalled that Prokofiev complained, “If only they would explain what they want from me, I have sufficient technique to provide it.” The irony was, as Richter observed, that Prokofiev’s music actually corresponds to the principles of socialist-realist art, for it is tuneful and accessible.
One is left wondering whether the composer felt his return to the Soviet Union provided adequate compensation for the suffering he experienced. Certainly, he found a rewarding relationship with his wife and librettist Mira, and he gained the opportunity to work with the country’s most talented theater and cinema producers, though many of them suffered disgrace if not annihilation. Prokofiev’s response to Rostropovich’s question of whether he regretted giving up a comfortable life in the West to return to Soviet Russia was an emphatic no, for being among his own people and writing his works for them was, he felt, justification for all he had endured.
By Elizabeth Wilson, Bookforum; excerpts, edited by Musicon
Cf. Prokofiev’s diaries at Amazon