PROKOFIEV – THE RETURN TO RUSSIA. 1932 – 1941. AND THE REASONS?

It is inevitable that every commentator has referred to Prokofiev’s eventual return in 1936 as that of the Prodigal Son, except me that is. But what were his reasons? Truth to say, we none of us can know. We can all only conjecture. In the West there was shock. The American musical press saw it with disgust as the covert commie coming out. His friends in France, Francis Poulenc for one, were more than surprised in that Sergei had said nothing. After all bridge partners do not usually cancel a rubber without saying. In the Soviet Union he was welcomed home by a worshipping public, he himself hailed as a hero and his return a victory for Socialism. It was none of these things.

Nor does it appear that his decision was made suddenly. To begin with he had not left the Soviet Union in 1918 other than to seek his fortune temporarily in America but at the outset he intended to return. What was intended as a short stay became extended but he never settled in the USA. He might well have thought about returning home after his first visit but he probably preferred to return with something to show for it. He might have thought that he would be refused a further exit visa to go to Chicago for the planned opening of The Love of Three Oranges. He clearly felt more at ease in France than in the USA. There he was able to obtain commissions from Diaghilev who was persona non grata in the Soviet Union. He effectively was turning into an ex-pat who might return one day, but not yet. By 1923 he had discovered that his works were being played back home and in fact he received an invitation to conduct the Leningrad Philharmonic. He turned that down. This was at a time when he had just got married, his mother had been able to join him in the West and his future remained rooted in staying in the West. In 1927 came his first return tour and pressure to return. The 1929 tour produced problems with the Composers Union considering him too modernistic and too formalistic. If Prokofiev was tempted he still had to balance that against commissions from Diaghilev and from Koussevitsky. He also had a new family unit in Paris to consider. It was a balance he had to weigh up which at that time came down on staying.y 1932, Diaghilev having died, one important source for new commissions had dried up. One might well speculate whether Prokofiev was creatively tired with the direction of his music in Europe and America. He had been a proclaimed modernist through his student years, had staked his reputation in Europe as being as revolutionary, if not more so, than Stravinsky and it had become virtually impossible for him to write other music which reflected different facets of his make up. Stylistically he did not develop into a middle period as had, say William Walton, or do what Stravinsky would do, shed his skin and emerge with a new musical persona. Compositionally between 1928 and 1931 he was in a groove and appearing to lack the old inspiration. Now commissions came instead from the Soviet Union which allowed him to showcase the more lyrical and epic sides of his musical character.

However the most compelling reason for his return was that he was a homesick Russian wanting to go home and be with his friends. There may, however, be one other explanation. It comes from Shostakovitch’s memoires, Testimony, edited by Solomon Volkov. Shostakovitch did not take particularly to Prokofiev whom he found self-centred. Still he made one telling comment on this particular topic. It was that Prokofiev was an inveterate gambler who had mounting gambling debts around the world and that the reason for his return to Russia was that this was the only way he could escape his creditors. Whether that be true, I cannot say, but it is a cogent argument. One thing is certain. His return did not stem from political ideology. It made no difference to Sergei Prokofiev whether his political master was Peter the Great or Uncle Joe Stalin.

Prokofiev’s return to the Soviet Union took several years — from 1932 to 1936 he still considered Paris his home, but he frequently travelled to Moscow where he had a flat. More importantly, he began to receive commissions for new works from the Soviet Union. Prokofiev did not become a permanent Moscow resident until 1936.

One can also wonder as to how any free thinking individual, as Prokofiev undoubtedly was, could possibly have submitted himself to the restraints of the Soviet system. However, such a question is posed with hindsight and not with the eyes and ears of what one knew between 1932 and 1936. The Lenin revolution was about class and economics and not about the arts. Lenin appeared to have little or no aesthetic understanding but felt that in a classless society there would be no proletariat, no bourgeois for whose better understanding a work of art would be prepared and that therefore the artist should be free to find an appropriate level to which the citizen would aspire. The new soviet state was to be a revolutionary modern state and in the 1920’s it was encouraged to reflect that with revolutionary art. The modernist idiom of Prokofiev in France and America would probably have been in keeping at the time. The restraints only came about after Stalin was in complete control and the concept of Socialist Realism first promulgated about 1932. This was more appropriate to books and paintings than to music where realism, let alone socialism, was harder to discern. It was only with the decree following Stalin’s visit to see Lady Macbeth of the Mstensk District by Shostakovitch that in 1936 the repression started. Shostakovitch recognized it immediately with a Soviet Artist’s reply to Justifiable Criticism. Prokofiev was the bright eyed boy, to whom all promises were made, who thought it would not affect him. At that time the political trials and the artistic repression were not known by the idealists in the West. Russia was viewed as a Utopia for classless freedom by Cambridge professors and English poets, not that they went there as did the great American black singer, Paul Robeson. He did not find Nirvana. As for Prokofiev and others like him, they would end up abused…. as well as disabused.

The first commission from the Soviet Union in 1932 was to write the music for the film, Lieutenant Kijé and which Prokofiev soon reworked into the well known suite. The story is based on a verbal slip of the tongue which, to be understood, depends on a correct translation from the Russian. I have read two explanations. The background to the error takes place during an award ceremony before the Tsar. The first explanation is that by adding “ki” to the word for lieutenant and then the suffix “jé”, the citation became “the lieutenant, however” which the Tsar, who can never be wrong or corrected, understood to be a “Lieutenant However”. Thus was born a man who did not exist, who fell in love, got married and had to be killed off. The other explanation is that kijé means a blot; that there was a kijé on the paper and the spokesman referred to Lieutenant Blot. Each version depends upon which unreliable source one accepts. Of the two versions of the orchestral suite, the better known has a saxophone solo; the other a solo baritone singing. It is worth hearing the latter. The music for Lieutenant Kijé had all the popular appeal that had hitherto been missing in much of Prokofiev’s output. I first heard it in a themed concert entitled “Once upon A Time” in the early 50’s conducted by Solti. A word of caution “however”. Don’t go to Debenhams, especially at this time of year and especially not in the Glades at Bromley, just don’t think about it. There you will be “entertained” to so called Christmas carols. Sandwiched between a bilious “Have yourself a very merry Christmas” and a retching Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, you will be subjected to an anaemic arrangement of the Troika from Lieutenant Kijé, conceived originally as a post nuptial ride following a drunken wedding, now renamed “Christmas Sleighride”,. I have remonstrated in vain with the staff and suggested they join SOP but they seemed a little bewildered by my complaint!

This period between Paris and Moscow is marked by a number of other new works, the most important of which were the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the Second Violin Concerto. The concerto was not a commission from the USSR but written for the French violinist Robert Soetans who gave the first performance in Madrid in December 1935. It was an immediate success and became even more popular when championed by Jascha Heifetz. The Second Violin Concerto is typical of the other major works of this period and is said to mark a transition from his ‘toccata’ and ‘grotesque’ style into his ‘lyrical’ and classical’ style.

It was the Kirov Theatre which in 1934 commissioned a new ballet from Prokofiev who suggested Romeo and Juliet as the subject. The Kirov were unhappy because although the living can dance, the dying cannot. Prokofiev took it instead to the Bolshoi at Moscow who pronounced it as undanceable and the ballet itself was not performed until December 1938, not in Russia at all. (One internet source refers to it as the Brno Opera House in Prague! I wonder if the geographic knowledge of the anonymous American author indicates that he perhaps comes from Paris – Texas). In its original version Prokofiev wrote a happy ending where the lovers do not die and are able to keep on dancing. Lost parts of the original score were found in 2008. According to a columnist in the Independent, who is an absolute mine of information, mostly unreliable, Stalin himself would not allow Shakespeare to be altered and insisted that the story was put back. Prokofiev was not one to waste music and composed two orchestral suites and a piano transcription (Opus 75) of the ballet score in 1936 and 1937 with enough material over to compose a third suite in 1946. These transcriptions were warmly accepted by the public.

The twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution took place in 1937. By this time Prokofiev, resembling somewhat the Master of the Queen’s Musick, was happy to do his bit,. He wrote a Cantata, a forerunner for Alexander Nevsky. It is for a large orchestra, including three accordions, two choirs, is exceedingly noisy and lasts 45 minutes. It depicts the events leading up to the revolution which takes place in the sixth movement. This contains (inter alia) machine gun firing, the wail of fire engines, the sound of sirens, dancing to accordions, marching feet and the words of Lenin leading the proletariat. Later there is a solemn oath by Stalin at Lenin’s tomb to uphold the revolution. Prokofiev had grasped the concept of toeing the party line and Socialist Realism in music. Here was a work that matched all the requirements….but for one thing. Josef Stalin, the great Leader and Musicologist, did not like it and the work was withdrawn, never to be played again in Prokofiev’s lifetime.

Lieutenant Kijé had marked the beginning of a period of intense interest by Prokofiev in film music. He made a special trip to Hollywood as a musical ambassador in 1938 to study the techniques there, following which he scored the music for Eisenstein’s epic film, Alexander Nevsky in 1939, followed by several films in the war culminating with Ivan the Terrible (1942-5).
The soundtrack of the film of Alexander Nevsky sounds a bit worn these days but we are fortunate that Prokofiev immediately transcribed the material as a cantata which is one of the most exciting choral events in the calendar. The opening chorus of “In Our Native Russian Land” demonstrates that Prokofiev was every bit a nationalist as Mussorgsky or Borodin. The film itself has a number of co-incidental similarities with another film score of the time, Henry V by Walton in 1944. Both were written either during or under the clouds of impending war. Both contain historical subjects and tingle with patriotism. Both have battle scenes, that in Nevsky, the battle on ice, and Henry V, once more to the breach, at Agincourt. I wonder if anyone has thought of having them as bedfellows in the same concert… with Matthew Taylor conducting!

Apart from films Prokofiev was writing incidental music for the stage as well and as prolific in this field as Sibelius. His scores included several plays including Egyptian Nights (1934), Boris Godunov (1936), Eugene Onegin (1936), and Hamlet (1937). These are rarely to be heard but Egyptian Nights will be played in the LPO Festival.

At much the same time, soon after his full return in 1936 Prokofiev was asked by the Central Children’s Theatre to write a new musical symphony just for children. The idea was to cultivate ‘musical tastes in children from the first years of school.’ Prokofiev set about the project of writing a young person’s guide to the orchestra and completed Peter and the Wolf in four days. Its public debut was, in the composer’s words, inauspicious and the attendance was rather poor. I have no idea what royalties were paid in the Soviet system but by rights, if one compares with Howard Blake who wrote the music for “the Snowman”, Prokofiev should have been a multi-millionaire as a result. Mind you, Peter and The Wolf should now be kept from children as not being politically correct. It contains hunting to begin with and doubtless the Animal Rights movement would canvass for the protection of wolves!

Following his return it could be said that Prokofiev could do little wrong. He would have been aware of changes in the official outlook but they did not appear to affect him as they had Shostakovitch whose opera, the Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, brought down the full wrath of Stalin in January 1936. The change in the process of composing music was stark. In the West, a composer’s creativity was tempered only by economic realities, the ability to obtain commissions and the ability to be performed. In the Soviet Union, the environment became completely different. From the beginning, the Soviet Union was centrally controlled by party leaders in Moscow who dictated everything that was to be created, consumed or conceived. Thus artistic freedom was non-existent. Creativity was stifled by the whims of appointed party bureaucrats. In 1932 Stalin introduced his cultural policy of ‘Socialist Realism’ extending it a little later with guidelines for composers.

The important cultural ‘isms’ in the West, cubism, surrealism, atonalism were all pre-first world war concepts and therefore to be regarded as decadent. The main attention of the Soviet composer must be directed towards the victorious progressive principles of reality, towards all that is heroic, bright and beautiful. This distinguishes the spiritual world of Soviet man and must be embodied in musical images full of beauty and strength. Socialist Realism demands an implacable struggle against folk-negating modernistic directions that are typical of the decay of contemporary bourgeois art and culture.

Prokofiev began to feel the cold wind with the Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution in 1936-37, which was rejected as too modernist. Not put off by this he began a new opera based on the exploits of Semyon Kotko, a young Soviet hero during the occupation of Ukraine by the Germans after the revolution. As with Alexander Nevsky the Germans were the villains of the plot which was to have unforeseen consequences, not only for Prokofiev’s reputation but even worse for the director, Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Prior to 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were politically poles apart. The signing of the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact on 31 August 1939 took the West by surprise, paving the way for the joint Hitler/Stalin invasion of Poland the next day. Its effect on Prokofiev was that Germany was suddenly an ally of the Soviet Union. The imminent staging of Semyon Kotko with its portrayal of a brutal German occupation was no longer politically acceptable. Meyerhold, who had been a long time friend of Prokofiev going back to “The Gambler” and who was half way through producing Semyon Kotko, was arrested, disappearing in 1984 fashion, and executed in 1940. Prokofiev sought out Eisenstein to ask him to take over the production but he kept his head down. In fact Eisentstein was actually producing Die Valkyrie at Moscow for the benefit of the new found friends. Alexander Nevsky already had gone out on release in 1939 and this was also withdrawn from the screens. Prokofiev then proposed replacing the role of the Germans in the opera with the nationality of the villains being unspecified but this was not acceptable to the authorities. Semyon Kotko was removed from the official repertoire and not rehabilitated until 1970.

A further consequence for Prokofiev of the Soviet Union’s rapprochement with Germany was severed ties with France, the United States, and the rest of the West. There was no longer any need for Prokofiev to travel abroad as an ambassador of music and it was decreed he could no longer tour outside the Soviet Union. A further knock on effect was the Prokofiev family life. Foreigners were mistrusted. Lina was Spanish by birth, in itself a dangerous fact in Stalin’s paranoid state. The boys had been sent to an English speaking school which was closed down. Strains were taking place in the marital relationship and Prokofiev began playing away. It was not with Moscow Dynamo.

Sergei had first met Eleonora Damskaya in the spring of 1917 and they had had a brief but fiery affair before his departure for America. She became a harpist with the orchestra at the Maryinsky. In 1934, they were to meet again at a concert in Leningrad. Prokofiev, we know, was already married and the father of two sons; Eleonora had long been married also. Things happened as they do. It was probably only for old time’s sake but in March 1935 Eleonora gave birth to a boy she called Alexander. She made no secret who was the boy’s father. Apparently the little Alexander looked like a carbon copy of his famous father (not unlikely as Prokofiev and presumably the baby were both bald). Prokofiev knew about Alexander and always tried to help him and his mother.

In 1939 he met the poet Mira Mendelssohn when she was 24 and he 48. Things happened as they do. Prokofiev was seriously in love and moved in with Mira. Lina was none too pleased. In 1940 Prokofiev began writing his last complete opera, The Duenna (Betrothal in a Monastery). Mira collaborated on the Duenna and wrote many of the verses. It is based on a ballad opera of Sheridan, written following The Rivals with music by Thomas Linley. It was a pastiche opera more in the tradition of John Gay’s Beggars Opera. The story is one of elopement, set in Seville. It involves drunken monks but no barber. The Prokofiev opera had its staging delayed by the outbreak of war. When it finally premiered after the war in 1946, it was received with acclaim all over the Soviet Union.

Mira Mendelssohn also later helped write the lyrics for the next opera, “War and Peace”, which was to be the largest project that Prokofiev was to undertake. Following the German attack on the USSR on 22nd June 1941, important composers, writers and artists were sent for safety to Malchick in the Caucasus. Having already arranged that Mira would accompany him, Prokofiev also asked Lina to join him. However, when told that that woman would also be going, Lina put her foot down and refused to go and decided to stick it out with the children in Moscow for the duration. The marriage was effectively over but Lina was not prepared to agree to a divorce. Ultimately, Sergey and Mira were to marry in March 1948 but that and the consequences form part of another tragic story to tell and to be dealt with in the Post War Years.

PROKOFIEV – THE WAR YEARS AND POST WAR (1941 – 1953)

 

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 came as a complete surprise to most Russians including Prokofiev who related that, having first learned about it from the caretakers wife, he sought confirmation from Eisentstein. The invasion did at least resurrect Alexander Nevsky particularly in showing the Teuton hordes. The news of the invasion is said also to have come as a surprise to Stalin who became frozen by inaction. It was on Stalin’s orders that the cultural élite were ordered out of Moscow, in Prokofiev’s case to Nalchik in the Caucasus where he was established for three months in a kind of ex-pats’ artists’ colony.

 

At the time he had been at work on writing his ballet “Cinderella” but he turned now to something else he had been thinking on for some time, “War and Peace”. Lina has stated he had been speaking of it as early as 1935. Some years later Mira would read to him from Tolstoy’s novel and he planned an opera based on the personal circumstances of its leading characters against the background of Napoleon’s retreat. In April 1941 he had drafted an outline libretto. With the outbreak of war, his focus switched from the individual destinies to the creation of a national epic. The link to Hitler and the Nazi invaders with that of Napoleon at the head of the French army was obvious. The villains were not the problem. The more difficult association might have been between the Tsar Alexander 1 and Josef Stalin, a connection that the latter might well have deprecated. This work, as monumental as the novel which inspired it, would become the most challenging task to face Prokofiev. It took up all his energy in writing it and in his obtaining a production over the course of nearly ten years.

 

These war years were to be amongst the most prolific in Prokofiev’s output. Yet the compositions which emerged were written against the background of his deteriorating health. He first suffered a heart attack in the Spring of 1941. Later in January of 1945, Prokofiev fell and suffered severe concussion. He nearly died in the following days, his recovery hampered by his earlier heart attack and general fatigue from overwork. He would suffer recurring headaches and periods of dangerously high blood pressure until his death eight years later. Prokofiev never fully recovered from this accident, although the greatness of works which were to follow gave no indication of it.

 

The period spent in Nalchik was short but productive and Prokofiev was happily ensconced with friends, particularly Miaskovsky who was preparing his twenty third symphony, and other musical acquaintances. He described it there as a small town nestling in the foothills of the Caucasus with a delightful park (subsequently destroyed by the Germans) and a mountain range in the background. It was the chairman of the Arts Committee who told Prokofiev of the collection and recordings, made by Tanyev, of Kabardinian folk music, which he suggested was abundant in material that was untapped. Prokofiev contemplated using it as the basis of a second quartet but began to wonder whether the primitive nature of the original could adapt itself to his compositional style and at the same time be understood. The chairman however, reassured him that he should write as he felt. “If we don’t understand your quartet now, we will later on”. His first quartet had been written under the classical inspiration of Beethoven. Now he produced a string quartet (already illustrated by Matthew) based on Russo-Oriental folk melodies, but his approach had nothing in common with that of Rimsky Korsakov or Borodin nor of Ippolitov-Ivanov with his exotic Caucasian Sketches, in particular the Procession of the Sadar which sounds as if it was written to bring the tourists out to watch. What to my mind Prokofiev was able to achieve was a successful assimilation of folk-tune and sonata form. It was Constant Lambert in his “Music Ho!” , a study of music in decline, written in 1934, my constant reading companion over sixty years, who wrote of the conflict between nationalism and form . Incidentally, if I had my way, I would have every hotel replace its Gideon bibles with Music Ho! National expression was a prevalent musical movement in many countries during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, perhaps no more so clear cut as in Russia. The basis of traditional Austro-German sonata form is the exposition of two main themes and their subsidiary ideas and to develop them by dissecting them, reversing them and cross pollinating them before recapitulating them . The principal means of expression of nationalism was usually folk dance or song, music which, at its most basic is not susceptible to symphonic or quartet development without at the same time losing its national character. As Lambert wrote, “To put it vulgarly, the whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it again and play it rather louder”. This is best exemplified by the first movement of Borodin’s second symphony. The equivalent movement in his first symphony was less national but much better structurally developed.

 

The themes of the first movement of the Prokofiev quartet evidence their Caucasian roots and atmosphere but, though seemingly repetitive, Prokofiev is able to ring the changes in developing them in sonata form without any sense of loss of their initial national character. By the time the quartet was finished Prokofiev had moved on from the Northern Caucasus to Tbilisi in Georgia. He later learned that when the Germans had taken Nalchik, the Arts chairman had joined the partisans and had been killed in attacking enemy lines. Life in Tbilisi was hard and the winter exceedingly cold. There he continued to work constantly, despite his deteriorating health and the advancing Germans. He finished his original score for “War and Peace”, writing to Eisentstein that he would shortly be able to submit himself to his bondage”. This was a reference to the musical score he had undertaken to write for the film “Ivan The Terrible” which was now being planned as a trilogy. Soviet Film production had been moved to Alma Ata close to the Chinese border to where Prokofiev went on leaving Tbilisi and where he remained until 1943 when it became safer to return to Moscow.

 

Prokofiev had also set to work on what are known as his Wartime Sonatas. His sixth was actually completed before the war. He completed his seventh piano sonata which was to achieve international success but did nothing to improve the reputation of its predecessor, the first performance of which had been given by Prokofiev himself in a broadcast back in 1940, the page turner being Sviatoslav Richter. The first movement in particular was considered by one critic as exceedingly brutal. What it does tell us is that with the Great Patriotic War the party had taken its foot off the cultural brake. Certainly Prokofiev seemed to be writing what he wanted fairly freely with a mixture of his “old fashioned” modernism mixed, as and when he felt like it, with his seemingly newly acquired lyricism. What it amounts to is that Prokofiev was a multi-faceted composer who could bring to bear his varied abilities and mix and match as he saw fit.

 

The seventh sonata was given by Richter who had learned it by heart in four days. He has related how, during the first rehearsal, there was a problem with the piano pedal. Both he and Sergei crawled under the piano to sort it out and, in doing so, cracked their heads “so hard that we saw stars”. Prokofiev later recalled , “But we did fix the pedal after all, didn’t we!” The motoric third movement is another in Prokofiev’s pre-Soviet ‘toccata’ style, unrelenting in its rhythm and power. Yet for this sonata he was awarded his first Stalin Prize. When the Eighth Sonata was completed in 1944, Prokofiev was not well enough to play the premiere. This time he selected another brilliant young Soviet pianist, Emil Gilels, in his stead. Gilels gave the first performance on 29 December 1944. Although not as popular as the sixth and seventh, the eighth was described by Richter as “the richest of all of Prokofiev’s sonatas.”

Despite the harsh conditions imposed by war, Prokofiev’s output remained prolific. Apart from the second quartet and his ‘War’ sonatas he continued work on “War and Peace”. Also during this time, Prokofiev wrote incidental music for four films, completed the epic Cinderella ballet, a number of symphonic suites, a flute sonata with a transcription of it for violin and piano (made at the request of David Oistrakh) , two military marches, several folk songs, and the towering Fifth Symphony. By any standards this is an amazing number of works and represents the fruits of his workaholicism. Cinderella, second only to Romeo and Juliet in popularity among Prokofiev’s ballets, followed a circuitous route to its premiere on the Bolshoi stage in 1945. The work was originally commissioned by the Kirov Theatre during the period of the Soviet/German pact . Prokofiev was in fact working on the piano score to the second act of the ballet when the invasion actually began. This in itself immediately placed the project on hold and Prokofiev had to focus his energies elsewhere for two years. When he did resume work on the ballet at the end of 1943, he also completed a set of piano transcriptions (Opus 95 and 97) before starting on the orchestration. The ballet received its premiere in November1945 in Moscow with Galina Ulanova in the title role. She had earlier danced the lead in Romeo and Juliet as well. As the greatest prima ballerina of her day she was used to obtaining her way. She leaned heavily on Prokofiev to get him to switch the best tunes, which he had written for the fairy godmother, to Cinderella. Ulanova had met her match. No way was Prokofiev prepared to play ball on this, Ulanova or no Ulanova.

 

Of all the works in the wartime period his most successful was undoubtedly his Fifth Symphony which he began in 1944 immediately after he had completed the orchestral score for Cinderella. It received its first performance in January 1945 in Moscow against the background of the end of the war being in sight and Soviet troops pressing towards victory. It was to be also the last time Prokofiev was to conduct as soon afterwards he fell dangerously ill, nearly dying, following a fall and concussion and from which he never fully recovered. The work was highly praised. It quickly emerged as his most popular symphony and remains to this day one of his greatest orchestral works. He was awarded his second Stalin Prize for it.

 

Here I dare to enter Matthew’s territory, just a little, if he will forgive me. Every great composer has his own sonar fingerprints, something which tells you this can only be Bach, or Vivaldi or Beethoven. Often they may be identified by their use of their preferred instrument and Prokofiev certainly has his almost to himself. It is his use of the tuba. One hears it in Lieutenant Kijé and in the Montagues and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet and I noticed this particularly about a year ago at a performance of the fifth symphony. It starts with a quiet flute over quiet violins but then comes our tuba. Now usually the tuba is there to give extra beef to the trumpets and trombones or, as with early Sibelius, to back up the double basses of the string section. With the tuba, the little guy, usually hidden by his instrument and almost certain to end up with a hernia, is generally just an added support. What Prokofiev does is to use the tuba as a soloist to roam freely as anybody else would a solo violin. Few composers do so, Ravel being the notable exception in his orchestration of Bydlo from Mussorgsky’s Pictures from An Exhibition.  

 When you hear the tuba in Prokofiev you know it is Prokofiev. The shattering climax to the first movement of this symphony is followed by a scherzo originally intended for Romeo and Juliet. It has something of an almost American razzmataz about it. The third movement has a sad wistfulness and am I mistaken in thinking that there is something of Beethoven’s moonlight sonata in its rocking accompaniment in the strings? In this symphony, and the second movement in particular, I sense some distant family likeness to Aaron Copland. He, like Prokofiev, had been a modernist in the 1930’s, before finding his popular voice at very much the same time, in works like Rodeo, El Salon Mexico and Billy The Kid. The two share the same sense of homespun composition and of Copland it can be said that in the Fanfare for The Common Man, in all its simplicity, he was able to achieve with ease and without political dogma or diktat what socialist realism in Russia set out so heavy handedly to try to do and couldn’t.

 

The triumphalism of the fifth symphony sent out the right messages as the war came to an end. They danced the hokey cokey in the streets of Moscow, or its Russian equivalent. As a commemoration, Prokofiev wrote the Ode to the End of the War for a mixed ensemble including 8 harps, 4 pianos, wind, percussion and double basses. But Prokofiev’s thoughts were far bleaker and at variance with the need for optimism set out in the party line. He dwelt more upon the loss and waste that the country had had to endure. Coupled with this was his deteriorating physical condition which could only add to the pessimism he was expressing. His doctors ordered him to restrict his hours of work but Prokofiev needed work like a drug. In any case he could manage without a piano to go on composing wherever he was. He had begun his sixth symphony before the fifth. It is set in three long movements and he completed it in November 1945. It is written for a standard sized orchestra to which are added piano and celeste. Its brief moments of apparent happiness slip away leaving a sense of unease, of troubled times ahead, reminiscent in some ways of Mahler’s sixth symphony. The slow movement has a striking middle section which recalls perhaps the clock scene in Boris Godunov. The last movement contains what could be called a peasants’ clog dance, but not with the joy of Beethoven’s merrymaking peasants. It ends with the rhythm of the peasants becoming a stumping march. Commentators jump to interpret this as being Prokofiev’s comment on the trampling of Stalin’s totalitarian regime. The sixth symphony disappointed after its first performance. It is generally considered now to be his greatest.

 

Sergei and Mira had returned to Moscow in 1943 where he was happy enough living at a special composers village. He did not feel particularly at ease alongside composers whom he did not regard highly but who, because of their senior official positions in the Composers Union, saw themselves as superior. It was a price he could afford to put up with and ignore. His fortunes began to change for the worse after Stalin saw Ivan The Terrible, released in 1945, and which he did not like. Prokofiev’s other great rival, Stravinsky, wrote in his diary, “Luncheon here in New York. Went to see the most stupid and provincial Russian film, Ivan The Terrible, first part, with very embarrassing music of the poor Prokofiev”.

 

During the war the brake on artists’ freedom which had appeared to have been somewhat relaxed was re-applied, not just with a gentle application but by a fierce emergency stop with the iron heel of Andrej Zdhanov. It was he who had probably piloted the earlier pogrom against writers and composers in 1934. He was then party boss in Leningrad. By 1948 he was in the politburo, Stalin’s chosen successor, his son marrying Stalin’s daughter and at the ready to implement the every wish of his beloved leader. As previously with Lady Macbeth, the problem started with Stalin going to the opera. One wonders why Stalin did go to the opera. He never seemed to enjoy it and it always ended up with his need for a purge. On this occasion the opera concerned was The Great Friendship by one Vano Muradeli, an otherwise unknown mediocrity. The libretto contained all the ingredients required for a really good socialist realist work of art. The only problem was that he would not have known that the hero and martyr of the story, the old leader of the Georgian Bolsheviks, had actually been executed on Stalin’s order. Immediately his award was withdrawn, as was his opera. Now Zdhanov stepped in, heading a series of terrifying courts martial with all the composers lined up and dressed down about their duties to the party and how to compose their music. Each in turn confessed their failings. Each ignobly was made to level criticisms against the others. This period became known as Zhdanovshchina, “Zdhanov’s Terror”. Prokofiev was particularly singled out and vilified for his sixth symphony. Other leading composers were savaged including Shostakovitch and Katchaturian. Moise Weinberg, who had escaped the Nazis in Poland and whose family had all been wiped out by them, was condemned because his music was said to be too Jewish. Added to his other problems, all Prokofiev could do was bear it without grinning. Gone were the days when he had been Stalin’s blue eyed boy. In November 1948, Zdhanov, who was a heavy drinker, suddenly died but the repression continued until the death of Comrade Joe.

 

Yet another black cloud added to Prokofiev’s troubles. He and Lina had parted in 1941, she staying in Moscow during the war. Sergei and Mira were happy together but Lina would not agree to a divorce. She had found work during the war dealing with visiting Western delegations. By the end of the war she had been ill with diphtheria and in the post war paranoia she became suspected as a spy. In January 1948 Prokofiev was able to procure an annulment of the marriage which had taken place in Bavaria in 1923. My researches give two different reasons. The first is that the Soviet Union passed a law in 1947 which made marriages to foreign citizens null and void with retrospective effect. Another source states that marriages which had taken place abroad should have been registered in the Soviet Union and that the Prokofievs had failed to do so. My own legal instincts tell me that the second is the more likely. It seems that Sergei may have advanced his own omissions as reason for the annulment. In March he and Mira married and four weeks later Lina was to disappear. Some blame Mira believing she was a government agent, unlikely as she lived with and nursed Sergei till his death. Lina had gone out after receiving a phone call and was bundled into a car. She was sentenced to twenty years in a labour camp in the Gulag and must have been thankful she had taken her fur coat with her. It is not known if Prokofiev did try to help but it I imagine that his reaction was one of self preservation. Such disappearances were not an common occurrence and even the wife of Molotov received similar treatment whilst Stalin’s loyal foreign secretary remained silent. In an interview years later, Sergei’s older son, Sviatoslav said that he believed that Shostakovitch had written a letter on behalf of Lina. He also put his neck out to have Weinberg brought back to Moscow and these acts show him to be a caring and very brave man. Lina was released after eight years, during the Khrushchev years. By then Prokofiev was dead but she was able to get the annulment itself annulled and the validity of her marriage and the legitimacy of her children restored. She tried for many years to leave and was eventually granted permission to do so in 1974, nearly twenty years after she had followed her husband to the Soviet Union. She returned to Paris and recorded the narration of Peter and the Wolf when she was 88 years old.

 

The last years saw the deaths of close friends, Eisentein and particularly Miaskovsky who, with 27 symphonies under his belt, had lost all heart after the repression. Prokofiev, still subject to virulent attacks and venues closed to him, made some genuine attempts to produce what the state required but he also continued to compose works of stature. Particularly notable are the works for cello written for Rostropovitch, a sweet mellow cello sonata, a bed mate on the record shelves with that of Rachmaninov, and the powerful cello symphony.

 

His final symphony was the seventh composed in 1951 and 1952. Intended originally as a symphony for young listeners, it achieves a comparative simplicity but there are dark emotions beneath the surface. In some parts it returns to the innocence of the Classical Symphony. The first public performance of the seventh symphony was to be Prokofiev’s last public appearance. Five years later he was posthumously awarded a Lenin Prize for the work, not that he nor Lenin for that matter, would have known about it, a guilt offering perhaps from what had been an ungrateful nation.

 

Socialist realism as a system could never have produced a genius, only its galloping comedians and circus music. Like Halley’s comet, genius appears rarely. Unlike Halley’s comet we never know where it is going next to appear, but when it does it will not be a result of but despite the system. Sergei Prokofiev was such a genius.

 

Sergei Prokofiev died of a massive brain haemorrhage on the 5^th March 1953 at 9 pm. With great irony Josef Stalin died just under an hour later. Prokofiev’s death went unreported for some days, not so that of Stalin. Prokofiev’s flat was close to Red Square where the crowds came out to pay their last respects…to Stalin. The streets of Moscow were blocked off and traffic had come to a standstill. It cost a tremendous effort to move Prokofiev’s coffin from his apartment for a civil funeral. There was no room in the newspapers for an obituary. As Galina Vishnevskaya, wife of Mstislav Rostropovitch, wrote “And while hundreds of thousands of people trampled one another in the frenzy to bow one last time to the superman-murderer, the dark dank basement on Myauskaya Street was almost empty – the only people present being Prokofiev’s family and friends who happened to live nearby and could break through the police barriers”

 

CZECH MUSIC

FROM SMETANA TO MARTINU

This term Matthew Taylor will be dealing in particular with differing aspects of five major Czech composers from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Chronologically, they are:-

Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) and the particular aspect will be the symphonic poems from the cycle, Ma Vlast.

Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) particularly concentrating on his string quartets but also a comparison between his sixth symphony with that of Brahms’ second.

Josef Suk (1874 – 1935). Here Matthew has singled out for study Suk’s Asrael symphony completed in 1906

Leos Janacek (1853-1928) once described by me, in my note on Taras Bulba, as a weirdo. The particular focus in this case will be on the operas, Jenufa and the Cunning Little Vixen

Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959). His symphonies were composed at annual intervals in America between 1941 and 1945 with one stray late comer in 1951. Matthew will also introduce us to Martinu’s second string quartet written in 1925 and which will be played at the halls by the Wihan Quartet.

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Smetana, who was born in Bohemia, then forming part of the Hapsburg Empire, is said to be the first of the great Czech composers. Not quite so as there were several Bohemian composers, particularly in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, whose names do not appear in concert programmes alongside their contemporary Austrian top notchers. What there is no doubt about is that Smetana gave the lead to the emergent Czech nationalist movement during the nineteenth century. Interestingly, Smetana was primarily a German speaking Czech and only took up advocacy of the Czech language in his thirties. Even later on, in one of his most famous works, Ma Vlast, the river Vltava was also accorded its German name of Moldau.

His father was a brewer on the estate of Count Waldstein – now there’s a name to link back to Beethoven. Smetana started playing the violin at the age of five and clearly had talent. His father was himself an amateur player when he had the time. He had had three marriages and eighteen children. Anyway, he did not entertain any thought of a son of his playing professionally. That was no job for a Czech boy when you could be a brewer.

In 1840 Smetana moved to Pilsen for his general education and here he met up again with Katerina Kolar with whom he used to play piano duets in his boyhood. The 19-year-old Smetana was smitten. At this time she was studying piano in Prague with a celebrated teacher, Josef Proksch. She managed to persuade him to accept the impoverished Smetana as a student in composition and theory, allowing him to defer payment until he could afford it. This brought Smetana to Prague where he got to know the Director of Prague Conservatoire. In turn, he recommended Smetana to Count Leopold Thun to be the resident music master and piano tutor to his family. Smetana was then able to combine his extended stays in the country with the family during the summer with periods in town attending the Prague social “season”.

To begin with his ambition was to be a virtuoso in the Lisztian manner but he began to make out as a composer with a strong personality of his own. His early piano pieces, bagatelles and impromptus, had a charm which contained his already recognizable stamp. In 1848 political unrest was leading to revolution throughout Europe and with the build up and turbulence Smetana began to feel ill at ease with service in the Thun household. He decided to set up his own music school in Prague.  He then sought financial help from a number of quarters including Liszt who gave Smetana his encouraging support including offering to find a publisher for Smetana’s music. With the outbreak of the 1848 uprisings (to which he felt passionately committed), Smetana left the employ of the Thun family and opened the music school. In the following year he and Katerina got married.

Unfortunately the music school did not turn out to be a financial success and Mr and Mrs Smetana, against a background of a number of childbirths only one of which survived infancy, were soon struggling. Smetana himself was getting known and admired, not only by Liszt but he also had met Berlioz and the Schumanns. Despite such hobnobbing, his music was not achieving a breakthrough in Prague. In 1855 Katerina began developing signs of consumption. With this and with the growing political difficulties in Prague he grabbed at a chance to move to Gothenberg to take up a conductorship which had been offered to him. He and Katerina moved there. Alas the climate was not kind and Katerina died in 1857. Smetana stayed on living in Sweden till 1861. It was during this Gothenberg period that he was to write his first symphonic poems, a musical form invented by Liszt. Richard III is very much Liszt influenced. Its dramatic character appears to reflect the drama of Shakespeare’s play although Smetana had in fact written the music before choosing his subject. Wallenstein’s Camp, was based on one of a trilogy of plays by Schiller. The setting was set in Pilsen, his old stamping ground, during the thirty years war. Haakon Jarl was based Norwegian history of the 10^th century with fighting going on between Haakon and various people, all called Harald. A year after Katerina’’s death, Smetana married his brother’s sister in law, Bettina Ferdinandova but the marriage was not a happy one and Smetana sought other consolations over which we will draw a curtain..

In 1861 Smetana and Bettina returned to Prague which had returned to normal. Within a year of his arrival, the Provisional Theatre, dedicated to Czech language plays and operas, was opened, and Smetana became a leading light in the battle to establish it on a firm footing. This was achieved despite the fact that he had been a German speaker with considerable opposition from the conservative elements within Prague’s cultural society, who did not appreciate an ardent supporter of Wagner and Liszt, then arch-modernists, leading the way in Prague.

It was against this background that Smetana’s thoughts turned to creating musical dramas and orchestral pieces which celebrated the popular culture and history of the Czech people. There followed a series of operas, the first in 1863 being The Brandenburgers in Bohemia. This is a patriotic work which deals with Bohemia’s political history and a wholesale uprising. It was soon followed by The Bartered Bride, known by my friends in the orchestral pit at ENO as The Bastard Bride. Smetana had become the Theatre’s conductor, and things were looking up. The opera became such a runaway success that its position as the most popular Czech opera has remained unchallenged ever since. Smetana spent the rest of his life as an operatic composer trying to recreate this level of popular acclaim.

However, it was to music dramas that Smetana next turned and it is sad that these do not get sufficient performance in England. I would particularly recommend the next opera, Dalibor. It takes a more progressive musical stance. It has a plot reminiscent of Fidelio – hero locked up in prison and heroine planning his escape. Influenced by Wagner the work is based on leitmotifs but there is a greater melodic feel that only Czech music can produce. It was not well received but undaunted, he chose an equally ambitious political subject for his next opera, Libuše leading to the eventual triumph of the Czech people. Eight years passed before the first production and in the interim there were three further operas,The Two Widows (1874), a comedy, The Kiss (1876) and The Secret (1878), both inspired by stories set in the Bohemian countryside.

In 1874 Smetana began work on a cycle of symphonic poems to be entitled “Ma Vlast”, “My Country”. Effectively, having depicted his country in its many facets in his operas, he was about to do the same in his symphonic poems which he was to write over the next five years. During this period he began suffering from the physical disintegration caused by what was described as inherited syphilis, which was presumably a more respectable means of acquiring the disorder. Smetana realized he was going deaf and the incipient tinnitus was musically described in his string quartet “From My Life” with a long high pitched violin note interrupting the earlier joys. Ma Vlast finally consisted of six separate symphonic movements, the last two, Tabor and Blanik having been added later. Unlike the works written in Stockholm, these set about depicting various aspects of Bohemian history, geography, legend and dance. The best known, often played on its own, is the second, Vltava which, like the fourth, Bohemia’s Woods and Meadows, was issued separately in the days of 78 rpm records. However they are all best heard in context as part of the whole cycle. As Matthew will be analysing them, I will not attempt to do likewise but just make some passing comments.

The opening work is Vysherad, the name of a historic 10^th century castle on a promontory overlooking the mouth of the Vltava river. It is much associated with legend. There is a cemetery there where the remains of Smetana and Dvorak are buried. The main theme of Vysherad is played at the start on two harps before being bandied round the orchestra. The importance of this theme becomes apparent as it appears in some, not all, the other works. For those who only know Vltava – it gets a daily performance on Classic FM – they may not realize that what sounds like a fanfare coda at the end is in fact the Vysherad theme denoting the river flowing past the castle towards the sea.

Vltava is a wonderful description of a river babbling at its source before flowing through the countryside, past peasants dancing, reaching a climax through its rapids until it flows majestically past Vysherad. The main theme of Vltava bears an uncanny resemblance to Hatikvah, the Zionist hymn of hope which became the Israeli national anthem. Co-incidence? I doubt it. Vltava is the same tune in the major to the minor of Hatikvah. Here is an abbreviated extract from one internet source:-

“The melody for Hatikvah derives from the La Mantovana, a 17th-century Italian song. Its earliest known appearance in print was in the del Biado’s collection of madrigals. Later known in early 17th-century Italy as “Ballo di Mantova” its melody gained wide currency in Renaissance Europe, and was also famously used by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana in his symphonic poem celebrating Bohemia, “Má vlast,” as “Vltava” (Die Moldau).”

The Zionist movement was born in Bohemia. The music for Hatikvah is said to have been written by one Shmuel Cohen in 1888. Either he was influenced by a common ancestor of Vltava or he had heard Vltava which had received its first performance in 1882 and thought “Now that’s the tune I’ve been waiting for”.

The third work of the cycle is Sarka who was an Amazon like figure of legend who was apart from being a feminist warrior was a misandrist who seduced her man before killing him. She must have been worth dying for.

Bohemias Woods and Meadows is a succession of themes developing from one to the other. It tells no story but is a combination of nature painting and country dancing.

The last two are both separate and linked. Tabor is based on the wars of the Protestant leader Jan Huss, who lived some hundred years before Luther. It starts with a statement of the Hussite hymn, “Ye who are the warriors of God”, used also by Dvorak in his overture, The Hussite. Its theme is like a Morse code tattoo. It is with this theme that Tabor ends with the tattoo as a question mark. It is immediately followed with exactly the same phrase for the opening of Blanik. There is even more symphonic development as it reaches a climax with the Hussite hymn combined with the Vysherad theme giving the whole cycle a feel of thematic cohesion.

Ma Vlast is a work of great national and emotional appeal. In particular it was Rafael Kubelik who conducted it with the Czech Philharmonic when the Nazis entered Prague in March 1939 and again when Kubelik returned to Prague in 1990 after the Velvet Revolution.

Smetana could not conduct Ma Vlast because of his disability. He went on to write the first act of the opera Viola in 1883, based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. However he suffered his final mental collapse in April 1884. In mid-May he died, as did Schumann, in an asylum.