Alexander Nevsky. Cantata for chorus and orchestra. < Op. 78. > Words by V. Lugovskoi and S. Prokofiev. English version A. Steiger. Vocal score by L. Atovmian. Russ.& Eng
Semen Kotko. Opera v piati deistviiakh. Libretto V. Kataeva i S. Prokof'eva po povesti V. Kataeva ... Partitura. < Semyon Kotko. Opera in five acts. Libretto ... Prokofiev after story by V. Katayev. Score. >
Sergey Prokofiev, in full Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev, was a 20th-century Russian (and Soviet) composer who wrote in a wide range of musical genres, including symphonies, concerti, film music, operas, ballets, and program pieces.
Background
Prokofiev was born in 1891 in Sontsovka (now Sontsivka, Pokrovsk Raion, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine), a remote rural estate in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father, Sergei Alexeyevich Prokofiev, was an agronomist. Prokofiev's mother, Maria (née Zhitkova), came from a family of former serfs who had been owned by the Sheremetev family, under whose patronage serf-children were taught theatre and arts from an early age. She was described by Reinhold Glière (Prokofiev's first composition teacher) as "a tall woman with beautiful, clever eyes ... who knew how to create an atmosphere of warmth and simplicity about her." After their wedding in the summer of 1877, the Prokofievs moved to a small estate in the Smolensk governorate. Eventually, Sergei Alexeyevich found employment as a soil engineer, employed by one of his former fellow-students, Dmitri Sontsov, to whose estate in the Ukrainian steppes the Prokofievs moved.
By the time of Prokofiev's birth, Maria – having previously lost two daughters – had devoted her life to music; during her son's early childhood, she spent two months a year in Moscow or St Petersburg taking piano lessons. Sergei Prokofiev was inspired by hearing his mother practising the piano in the evenings, mostly works by Chopin and Beethoven, and wrote his first piano composition at the age of five, an "Indian Gallop", which was written down by his mother: it was in the F Lydian mode (a major scale with a raised 4th scale degree), as the young Prokofiev felt "reluctance to tackle the black notes". At the age of nine, he was composing his first opera, The Giant, as well as an overture and various other pieces.
Education
In 1902, Prokofiev's mother met Sergei Taneyev, director of the Moscow Conservatory, who initially suggested that Prokofiev should start lessons in piano and composition with Alexander Goldenweiser. Unable to arrange that, Taneyev instead arranged for composer and pianist Reinhold Glière to spend the summer of 1902 in Sontsovka teaching Prokofiev. The first series of lessons culminated, at the 11-year-old Prokofiev's insistence, with the budding composer making his first attempt to write a symphony. The following summer, Glière revisited Sontsovka to give further tuition. When, decades later, Prokofiev wrote about his lessons with Glière, he gave due credit to his teacher's sympathetic method but complained that Glière had introduced him to "square" phrase structure and conventional modulations, which he subsequently had to unlearn. Nonetheless, equipped with the necessary theoretical tools, Prokofiev started experimenting with dissonant harmonies and unusual time signatures in a series of short piano pieces he called "ditties" (after the so-called "song form", more accurately ternary form, on which they were based), laying the basis for his own musical style.
Despite his growing talent, Prokofiev's parents hesitated over starting their son on a musical career at such an early age, and considered the possibility of his attending a good high school in Moscow. By 1904, his mother had decided instead on Saint Petersburg, and she and Prokofiev visited the then capital to explore the possibility of moving there for his education. They were introduced to composer Alexander Glazunov, a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, who asked to see Prokofiev and his music; Prokofiev had composed two more operas, Desert Islands and The Feast during the Plague, and was working on his fourth, Undina. Glazunov was so impressed that he urged Prokofiev's mother to have her son apply for admission to the Conservatory. He passed the introductory tests and enrolled that year.
Several years younger than most of his class, Prokofiev was viewed as eccentric and arrogant, and annoyed a number of his classmates by keeping statistics on their errors. During that period, he studied under, among others, Alexander Winkler for piano, Anatoly Lyadov for harmony and counterpoint, Nikolai Tcherepnin for conducting, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for orchestration (though when Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908, Prokofiev noted that he had only studied with him "after a fashion" – he was just one of many students in a heavily attended class – and regretted that he otherwise "never had the opportunity to study with him"). He also shared classes with the composers Boris Asafyev and Nikolai Myaskovsky, the latter becoming a relatively close and lifelong friend.
As a member of the Saint Petersburg music scene, Prokofiev developed a reputation as a musical rebel, while getting praise for his original compositions, which he performed himself on the piano. In 1909, he graduated from his class in composition with unimpressive marks. He continued at the Conservatory, studying piano under Anna Yesipova and continuing his conducting lessons under Tcherepnin.
During World War I, Prokofiev returned to the Conservatory and studied organ to avoid conscription.
Prokofiev traveled to London in 1914, heard Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and established a liaison with the impresario Serge Diaghilev. Prokofiev was already a successful musician, published and performed, and the Diaghilev contact was the all but final stamp of Russian creative maturity in 1914.
Prokofiev longed for a sustained stay and impact abroad—the Russian tradition most recently confirmed by Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Stravinsky. But the war, Russia's faltering role therein, and the two revolutions of 1917 caused Prokofiev's Western contacts to pause. The "angels" that had financed others failed to materialize at first, and Diaghilev was not encouraging. In mid-1917 Prokofiev reached an understanding with the Chicago industrialist Cyrus McCormick. By this time Prokofiev had composed a number of piano pieces, the Scythian Suite for orchestra (a recasting of a ballet, Ala and Lolli, commissioned but rejected by Diaghilev), the First (Classical) Symphony, the First Violin Concerto, and the First and Second Piano Concertos, the Third being in the works. With these behind him, McCormick's invitation in his pocket, and the consent of the new Soviet government, the composer left for the United States in 1918.
In 1921 Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago. The American years were fitful ones financially, not the least because of competition from other Russian émigrés. He began in America the opera Flaming Angel, which, though never performed in his lifetime, was to dominate his thinking for many years. In 1922 he moved to Ettal in the Bavarian Alps. Here he lived, working mostly on the Flaming Angel and on piano and vocal works. Eventually he settled in Paris with his family and made that the center of his activity until 1936.
The Western years were productive ones, and it is well to emphasize the point, since Soviet thinking insists that they were "unproductive years of rootless desperation." He completed (for Diaghilev) the ballets Le Pas d'acier (1925), Prodigal Son (1928), and On the Dnieper (1930); the operas Love for Three Oranges (1919) and Flaming Angel (1927); a number of vocal works; the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Piano Concertos; chamber works, including opus numbers 34, 35, 39, 50 and 56; and many other works. He worked constantly, often on more than one piece at a time, and no small part of his effort was directed toward casting works for other mediums in symphonic form. Much of his work appears in the original version and in an orchestral version or versions. This includes all the ballets, parts of the Piano Sonatas, chamber works, and even his beloved opera Flaming Angel (as the Third Symphony).
In 1927 Prokofiev visited the Soviet Union and was well received. But on a second visit in 1929 the conservative Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) dominated the musical press and attacked the reluctant émigré. In late 1932 he was encouraged to visit again: the RAPM had been abolished, and his friends Miaskovsky, Asafiev, and Glière were enthusiastic about creative prospects in the Soviet Union. Prokofiev still hesitated, still visited, and sought and probably got assurances from high party and government sources. He finally moved to Moscow in 1936. He had done well in the West, but he was dissatisfied: as a concert pianist he had stood in Rachmaninov's shadow; and he had failed to capture that creative leadership enjoyed by Arnold Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
Through 1938 Prokofiev continued to tour the West, but the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 brought on a politically anti-international period, and he never went abroad again. He was simultaneously in the throes of separation from his wife, herself an international symbol. For these reasons his autobiographical memoirs, a substantial part of which was written during the pact, are unfortunately inaccurate in discussing the West. In his memoirs he characterized his own style as shaped from four main lines of development: first, the lyric, singing line; second, the classical grounding; third, the urge to seek and innovate; and fourth, a relentless, motoric, toccatalike pulse.
Prokofiev had already begun, in his Soviet period, to write movie scores (Lieutenant Kijé, 1934; Alexander Nevsky, 1938), patriotic works (Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution, 1937), and works of lighter genre and direct appeal (Peter and the Wolf, 1936). He held at this time the notion of multiple styles for the contemporary composer. In 1939 he began another opera, Semyon Kotko, based on a story by Valentin Kataev. The opera dealt with Germans as enemies and was difficult to mount during first a pro-German then an anti-German period. In it Prokofiev worked out a usage for those idioms and experiments too advanced for the increasingly conservative official view of art: the depiction of inimical forces. Prokofiev's coworker, the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold, was arrested and sent to a labor camp (where he died) for creative errors. Prokofiev seemed immune to such reprimands and punishments, which were common in the late 1930s.
During World War II Prokofiev was evacuated to a series of Eastern centers. He worked on more film scores, including Ivan the Terrible with Sergei Eisenstein, his opera War and Peace, and on the Second (Kabardinian) String Quartet. He completed the Fifth Symphony in 1945. That year he incurred the illness, hypertension, that was finally to prove fatal, and it became clear that he was beginning to draw critical fire from official and semiofficial sources. In 1948 he was a principal target in the party and government criticism and punishment of artists. He did not live to see that criticism rescinded, as Shostakovich did. Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953.
Achievements
The Russian-Soviet composer Sergei Sergeevich Prokofiev went down in history as a key figure in modern music. He was prolific in all genres and was a master craftsman. His works are probably the most played of 20th-century composers.
In spite of being censured by the Soviet authorities, Sergei Prokofiev had received six Stalin Prizes, one in 1943, three in 1946, one in 1947 and one in 1951. In 1957, he was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize for his ‘Seventh Symphony.’
The composer was honoured in his native Donetsk Oblast when the Donetsk International Airport was renamed "Donetsk Sergey Prokofiev International Airport" and the Donetsk Musical and Pedagogical Institute was renamed the "S.S. Prokofiev State Music Academy of Donetsk" in 1988.
In Sergei's final years Prokofiev's performances were officially limited because of his clouded political situation and were generally confined to children's concerts and children's performing groups. His last works, including the Seventh Symphony and the ballet Stone Flower, reflected this. He even spoke of a refreshed awareness of his own childhood.
Views
In the works of his last 8 to 10 years Prokofiev added at least two more lines of development to those he had specified earlier. One of these was the unabashed heroic element, first used to any great extent in the Fifth Symphony. This work, with its "heroism, " indicated that he had noted the combinations so successful in Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. The other line, perhaps involuntarily developed, was that of the ingenuous - the deliberately but sincerely naive. This involved light, vulnerable, singable tunes and harmonies and showed scant trace of the caustic, irreverent treatment he often reserved for such simplicity.
Quotations:
"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major."
"My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices."
"I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions."
"Formalism is music that people don't understand at first hearing."
"Of course I have used dissonance in my time, but there has been too much dissonance. Bach used dissonance as good salt for his music. Others applied pepper, seasoned the dishes more and more highly, till all healthy appetites were sick and until the music was nothing but pepper."
"When the Second World War broke out, I felt that everyone must do his share, and I began composing songs and marches for the front. But soon events assumed such gigantic and far-reaching scope as to demand larger canvasses."
"I want nothing better, more flexible or more complete than the sonata form, which contains everything necessary for my structural purposes."
"I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices."
"It seemed to me that had Haydn lived to our day he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time. That was the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the classical style. And when I saw that my idea was beginning to work, I called it the Classical Symphony."
"At home we didn't talk about religion. So gradually the question faded away by itself and disappeared from the agenda. When I was nineteen my father died; my response to his death was atheistic."
"My mother had to explain that one couldn't compose a Liszt rhapsody because it was a piece of music that Liszt himself had composed."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Arthur Honegger proclaimed that Prokofiev would "remain for us the greatest figure of contemporary music," and the American scholar Richard Taruskin has recognised Prokofiev's "gift, virtually unparalleled among 20th-century composers, for writing distinctively original diatonic melodies."
Interests
Sport & Clubs
By seven, he had also learned to play chess. Chess would remain a passion of his, and he became acquainted with world chess champions José Raúl Capablanca, whom he beat in a simultaneous exhibition match in 1914, and Mikhail Botvinnik, with whom he played several matches in the 1930s.
Connections
In 1923 Prokofiev married the Spanish singer Carolina Codina, whose stage name was Lina Llubera. They had two sons, Sviatoslav and Oleg.
In the summer of 1939 he met the Soviet author Mira Mendelson. The first hint of their relationship was his setting of one of her poems in the cycle "Seven Songs" (1939). In 1941 Prokofiev left his wife and their two sons and lived openly with Mira throughout the World War II years. They married on January 13, 1948 and were together until his death in 1953.
Father:
Sergei Alekseevich Prokofiev
(1846-1910)
Mother:
Maria Grigoryevna Zhitkova
(1855-1924)
wife (1):
Carolina Codina
(21 October 1897 – 3 January 1989)
She was a Spanish singer and the wife of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. She spent eight years in the Soviet Gulag.
Son:
Oleg Prokofiev
(14 December 1928, Paris – 20 August 1998, Guernsey)
He was an artist, sculptor and poet.
Son:
Sviatoslav Prokofiev
(1924-2010)
Wife:
Mira Mendelson
(m. 1948–1953)
Collegue :
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky
(17 June 1882 – 6 April 1971)
He was a Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor.
