Sergei Prokofiev

• 1. Introduction

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  Sergei Prokofiev died on the 5th of March 1953 , the same day as Joseph Stalin. His coffin had to be carried by hand through the back streets of Moscow, away from the vast crowds mourning the dictator. About 30 people attended his funeral. For a composer whose works filled concert halls across two continents, that disparity says something essential about the life he lived: brilliant, turbulent, and shadowed at every turn by forces larger than music.

  Prokofiev left behind seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, and nine completed piano sonatas , a scale of output that places him among the major composers of the 20th century. His name appears on works as varied as the playful Peter and the Wolf, the searing Romeo and Juliet, and the War Sonatas, composed while his country fought for survival. How a boy born on a rural estate in the Ukrainian steppes became that composer, and what it cost him, is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. The Boy from Sontsovka

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  Prokofiev was born in Sontsovka, a village then in the Bakhmut uezd of the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire, on an estate where his father worked as a soil engineer. His mother, Maria, came from a Saint Petersburg family of former serfs owned by the Sheremetev family, under whose patronage serf-children had been taught theatre and arts. She had lost two daughters before Sergei was born, and had devoted herself to music, spending two months a year in Moscow or St Petersburg taking piano lessons.

  The young Prokofiev heard his mother practicing Chopin and Beethoven in the evenings, and at the age of five wrote his first piano composition, an "Indian Gallop," in the F Lydian mode because, as he later explained, he felt a "reluctance to tackle the black notes." His mother wrote it down for him. By seven, chess had also taken hold , a passion that would stay with him for life. He eventually became acquainted with world chess champions Jose Raul Capablanca, whom he beat in a simultaneous exhibition match in 1914, and Mikhail Botvinnik.

  At nine, Prokofiev composed his first opera, The Giant. Opera would remain the genre he was most drawn to for the rest of his career, even when the genre returned his affection badly. His composition teacher Reinhold Gliere, who spent the summer of 1902 in Sontsovka teaching the eleven-year-old, later described Maria Prokofiev as "a tall woman with beautiful, clever eyes ... who knew how to create an atmosphere of warmth and simplicity about her." Prokofiev acknowledged the debt to Gliere but later complained that his teacher had introduced him to "square" phrase structure and conventional modulations , things he subsequently had to unlearn.

• 3. The Conservatory Rebel

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  Alexander Glazunov, a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, was so impressed by the thirteen-year-old Prokofiev's compositions in 1904 that he urged the boy's mother to enroll him immediately. Prokofiev passed the introductory tests and entered the Conservatory that year, several years younger than most of his classmates.

  His peers found him eccentric and arrogant. He annoyed classmates by keeping statistics on their errors. He studied under Anatoly Lyadov for harmony and counterpoint, Nikolai Tcherepnin for conducting, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for orchestration , though Prokofiev noted he had studied with Rimsky-Korsakov "after a fashion" in a heavily attended class, regretting the lack of closer contact before Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908. Among his peers, Nikolai Myaskovsky became a close and lifelong friend.

  In 1909, Prokofiev graduated from composition with unimpressive marks and kept studying, now under Anna Yesipova for piano. His real reputation was built at the St Petersburg Evenings of Contemporary Music, where he performed adventurous works including his Etudes, Op. 2, chromatic and dissonant enough to earn him an invitation to give the Russian premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstucke, Op. 11. His Sarcasms for piano, Op. 17 (1912), made extensive use of polytonality. At the premiere of his Second Piano Concerto on the 23rd of August 1913 in Pavlovsk, audience members reportedly left the hall shouting, "To hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!" The modernists, however, were in rapture.

  In 1914, Prokofiev finished his career at the Conservatory by entering a competition open to the five best piano students. The prize was a Schroeder grand piano. He won it by performing his own Piano Concerto No. 1.

• 4. Diaghilev and the Ballet World

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  On a trip to London in 1914, Prokofiev made contact with the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The relationship would define a decade of his creative life. Diaghilev commissioned Prokofiev's first ballet, Ala and Lolli, but when Prokofiev brought the work in progress to him in Italy in 1915, Diaghilev rejected it as "non-Russian," urging Prokofiev to write "music that was national in character."

  The commissioned replacement was Chout, drawn from a collection of folk tales by the ethnographer Alexander Afanasyev. The subject had been suggested to Diaghilev by Igor Stravinsky as a possible ballet, and Diaghilev and his choreographer Leonide Massine helped shape it into a scenario. Prokofiev revised the work extensively in the 1920s following Diaghilev's detailed critique. When the ballet finally premiered in Paris on the 17th of May 1921, the audience included Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, and Maurice Ravel. Stravinsky called it "the single piece of modern music he could listen to with pleasure." Ravel called it "a work of genius."

  Three further Diaghilev commissions followed: Le pas d'acier, designed to portray Soviet industrialisation, was enthusiastically received by Parisian audiences and critics. The Prodigal Son, when first staged in Paris on the 21st of May 1929 with choreography by George Balanchine and Serge Lifar in the title role, moved the audience with its final scene , the prodigal son dragging himself across the stage on his knees. Diaghilev told Prokofiev that in that music he had "never been more clear, more simple, more melodious, and more tender." Only months later, Diaghilev died.

• 5. Exile and Return

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  After the Revolution of 1917, Prokofiev sought permission to leave Russia. People's Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky told him: "You are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in life. We ought to work together. But if you want to go to America I shall not stand in your way." Prokofiev arrived in San Francisco on the 11th of August 1918 after being held for questioning by immigration officials on Angel Island.

  The American years were difficult. He received a commission from the Chicago Opera Association for The Love for Three Oranges, but the opera's conductor, Cleofonte Campanini, died before the premiere could take place. The delay cost Prokofiev his American solo career. By April 1920, in financial difficulty, he left for Paris rather than return to Russia as a failure.

  In Paris, Prokofiev navigated a complicated relationship with Stravinsky. In June 1922, during an audition of The Love for Three Oranges for Diaghilev, Stravinsky refused to hear more than the first act, then accused Prokofiev of "wasting time composing operas." Prokofiev replied that Stravinsky "was in no position to lay down a general artistic direction, since he is himself not immune to error." According to Prokofiev, Stravinsky "became incandescent with rage" and "we almost came to blows." The two men eventually restored their friendship; Stravinsky later described Prokofiev as the greatest Russian composer of his day, after himself.

  The Love for Three Oranges finally premiered in Chicago on the 30th of December 1921, under Prokofiev's own baton. In 1923, Prokofiev married the Spanish singer Carolina Codina, known on stage as Lina Llubera, and they had two sons. By the early 1930s, the Great Depression had sharply reduced opportunities for opera and ballet productions in America and Western Europe, and Prokofiev, who had always seen himself as a composer first and resented time lost to touring as a pianist, began building connections with the Soviet Union. He returned permanently to Moscow with his family in 1936.

• 6. The Soviet Years

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  Peter and the Wolf, one of Prokofiev's most beloved works, was composed in 1936 for Natalya Sats' Central Children's Theatre. That same year, the massive Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution was blocked by the cultural official Platon Kerzhentsev, who demanded at its audition, "Just what do you think you're doing, Sergey Sergeyevich, taking texts that belong to the people and setting them to such incomprehensible music?" The Cantata was not performed until the 5th of April 1966, more than 13 years after the composer's death.

  In 1938, Prokofiev collaborated with the director Sergei Eisenstein on the historical epic Alexander Nevsky, composing some of his most inventive and dramatic music despite the film's very poor sound recording. He later adapted the score into a cantata for mezzo-soprano, orchestra and chorus, which was widely performed. At the end of 1939, he was commissioned to compose Zdravitsa , subtitled Hail to Stalin in English , to celebrate Joseph Stalin's 60th birthday.

  Also in 1939, Prokofiev composed Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7, and 8, widely known as the "War Sonatas." Sonata No. 7 was premiered by Sviatoslav Richter in Moscow on the 18th of January 1943; No. 8 was premiered by Emil Gilels in Moscow on the 30th of December 1944. Biographer Daniel Jaffe argued that the central movement of Sonata No. 7 opens with a theme based on the Robert Schumann lied "Wehmut" ("Sadness"), whose text translates as: "I can sometimes sing as if I were glad, yet secretly tears well and so free my heart." Both Sonata No. 7 and No. 8 won Stalin Prizes.

  Romeo and Juliet, commissioned by the Kirov Theatre, was staged on the 11th of January 1940. The dancers had struggled so severely with its syncopated rhythms that they nearly boycotted the production. To everyone's surprise, the ballet was an instant success.

• 7. War, Condemnation, and Silence

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  The German invasion of the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941 made Prokofiev's long-planned opera of Tolstoy's War and Peace feel urgently timely. He was evacuated to the Georgian SSR, living in Tbilisi from the 11th of November 1941 until the 29th of June 1942, where he began the opera and also composed his Second String Quartet and Piano Sonata No. 7. His relationship with the writer Mira Mendelson, who was 25 years old at the time, had led to his separation from Lina, who chose to remain in Moscow despite Prokofiev's attempts to persuade her to leave.

  Prokofiev conducted the premiere of his Fifth Symphony on the 13th of January 1945, just a fortnight after the triumphant premieres of his Eighth Piano Sonata and the first part of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible on the 30th of December 1944. On the 20th of January 1945, only a week later, he fainted in his apartment due to untreated chronic hypertension and suffered a concussion. Composer Dmitry Kabalevsky visited him in hospital and found him semi-conscious, writing, "with a heavy heart, I left him, I thought it was the end." Prokofiev never fully recovered.

  On the 10th of February 1948, the day before the Zhdanov Decree was published, Prokofiev was at a Kremlin ceremony marking his elevation to People's Artist of the RSFSR. The decree denounced six composers , Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Shebalin, Popov, and Myaskovsky , for "formalism." Eight of Prokofiev's works were banned from performance. By August 1948, his personal debt had reached 180,000 rubles. Meanwhile, Lina had been arrested on the 20th of February 1948, charged with espionage for attempting to send money to her mother in Spain. After nine months of interrogation, she was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor, and was released on the 30th of June 1956.

  In spring 1949, Prokofiev wrote his Cello Sonata in C major, Op. 119, for the 22-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich. After a stroke on the 7th of July 1949, his doctors limited him to an hour of composing a day. His last public appearance was on the 11th of October 1952, at the premiere of his Seventh Symphony, written for the Children's Radio Division.

• 8. Legacy

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  Arthur Honegger said that Prokofiev would "remain for us the greatest figure of contemporary music." The American scholar Richard Taruskin wrote of Prokofiev's "gift, virtually unparalleled among 20th-century composers, for writing distinctively original diatonic melodies." Yet for some years his reputation in the West suffered from Cold War antipathies, and his music never gained from Western academics and critics the same esteem as Stravinsky's and Schoenberg's, which had greater influence on younger musicians.

  Mira Mendelson spent the years after his death organizing his papers and promoting his music in their shared Moscow apartment. She left her memoirs incomplete at her death in 1968-15 years after Prokofiev. Inside her purse, a note dated February 1950 and signed by both Prokofiev and Mendelson read: "We wish to be buried next to each other." Their remains are buried together at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

  Lina Prokofiev outlived her ex-husband by many years, dying in London in early 1989. She acted as storyteller for a recording of Peter and the Wolf on Chandos Records, conducted by Neeme Jarvi with the Scottish National Orchestra. Prokofiev and Mira's sons , Sviatoslav (1924-2010), an architect, and Oleg (1928-1998), an artist, sculptor, and poet , each dedicated much of their lives to promoting their father's work. In 2011, Prokofiev's 120th birthday was marked with a Google Doodle. In Donetsk Oblast, the Donetsk Sergei Prokofiev International Airport was named in his honor; the facility was destroyed in 2014 during the First and Second Battle of Donetsk Airport, a reminder that the landscape of his birth remains contested ground.