Sergey Prokofiev

Sergey Prokofiev, l’enfant terrible, the great of the twentieth century, known in stark contrast to his countrymen Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky as the composer who went back to the U.S.S.R. It was a narrow escape to begin with—the tsar and his family were murdered shortly after he left the country for a United States concert tour—but a decade later, he went back.

And why not? America had never warmed to the man—a rash of bad luck kept his operas from taking off, and he left North America as poor as he had come there. Paris was better—these were the days of Diaghilev, the rightly famous impresario, who coaxed Stravinsky and Ravel of masterpieces and had as much luck with the young Prokofiev. But his works were misunderstood—or unremarkable. He didn’t understand where Stravinsky was taking music, and as for Les Six, the cabal of French modernists, he never quite fit in.

But maybe Mother Russia could appreciate her son. So a tour was planned, back to the homeland with his new Spanish bride.

Coming to the Latvian border, he wrote: “This is the last point at which it’s still not too late to turn back. Very well, perhaps it’s shameful, but when all’s said and down we could go through with it, if it’s virtually a matter of life and death.”

And so he went home, and they loved him there. The government treated him to luxury, a genius’s welcome. People told him to be careful, the phones had been tapped. People said be wary, single homes were being crammed with up to eighteen families. Sergey was no fool—he viewed this new experiment in economics and political theory with skepticism… but in his speeches at the time he lauded the impressive performance of the new union. He wrote more guarded appraisals in his journal, yet nevertheless believed he could mold his own style into that of the new Soviet art.

Diaghilev died. Stravinsky ruled Europe, Rachmaninoff America. Perhaps Prokofiev could stake his claim in his homeland—and so he took his family there to stay.

Why not? Sergey was allowed the rare privilege of retaining his passport, allowing him free reign to leave when he wished. He was allowed his luxuries—even bought a 1937 Ford, blue, streamlined, on his tour of the same year in the United States.

Stalin was gaining power. The Association of Contemporary Music strove to keep the Russian musical scene liberal, importing works by Schoenberg and Berg, but lost ground to the opposing Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, whose aesthetics matched Stalin’s.

Purges were occurring. People vanished. Shostakovich opened his second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, in 1934 to great success. Pravda, the organ of the government, wrote that the opera wasn’t music—it was chaos. Much of this derived from Stalin’s simple dislike after viewing the opera—he preferred folk tunes.

And who had led Shostakovich astray into composing this decadent monstrosity? The composer, Khrenikov, announced it was Prokofiev. Who dared to imply that there are two sorts of music, one for the masses and one not for them!

Prokofiev composed. In the summer of 1936, Prokofiev spent his time on three works by Alexander Pushkin (the famous writer’s death was reaching its centenary): The Queen of Spades, Eugene Onegin, and Boris Godunov. The state shut down each by official order. The Bolshoi dropped his ballet, Romeo and Juliet, for a lack of socialist content.

He turned to simpler works: marches, songs based on patriotic texts, folk tunes, for symphonies, chamber music, anything without a vocal part, bored Stalin. Such pieces were “undemocratic” and often dismissed by Party authorities.

Peter and the Wolf was a success, marred somewhat by the disappearance of Natalie Satz, who was supposed to narrate the piece and who had first suggested the project to Prokofiev—Satz’s husband had been executed for treason and she’d since been sent to the Gulag.

He strove to create works in the new paradigm, only to have them similarly rejected. Stalin turned 60, and Prokofiev courted favor by composing Zdravitsa, usually translated as “Hail to Stalin,” an unabashed paean. Soviet authorities called it a masterpiece—Prokofiev himself never commented on it in any of his writings.

Prokofiev’s output is marked by simplistic pieces dedicated to the glory of socialism, mixed with more personal works that were lauded one year, censored the next. His wife vanished, sent to a labor camp due to her excessive contact with outsiders. The Soviet Composer’s Union condemned Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Myakovsky, and Khachaturian for their “formalism.” It became impossible to get works performed.

He found another woman, Mira, and fell in love. He composed works for her that others decried as bourgeois.

In 1953, Mira checked on her lover’s health each morning, and each morning found him more hopeless. She inquired where the pain was, and he responded: “My soul hurts.” He and Stalin died on the same day, both of brain hemorrhages. No musician was used for Prokofiev’s funeral. No flower was brought. Stalin’s funeral had used them all.

And what was the sin? It was failing to hew the line of socialist realism: “a Marxist aesthetic doctrine that seeks to promote the development of social consciousness through didactic use of literature, art, and music.” This was contrasted with the ill-defined doctrine of formalism, primarily defined as anything that didn’t fall into the category of socialist realism.

The Soviet authorities, in their carving out a definition for socialist realism, left something to be desired in clarity. A political message would seem necessary, though not sufficient: Prokofiev’s grand October Cantata, setting texts by Lenin, et al, was rejected, perhaps for the dissonances given to the vocalists, and what that may have implied. Still, several garlands of blatantly obvious, and rather simplistic, settings of patriotic texts made it through.

We could come up with a more cynical reason for the censorship—a means for sub-par composers to compete with their betters, or an excuse for anything that didn’t strike Stalin’s fancy. But let’s look at the doctrine in its pure form, apart from the Soviets’ troubled terrestrial implementation: apolitical music was not acceptable. All art must have a message and purpose, and it must be a Marxist one.

It needn’t be so. We can easily imagine a different political doctrine, a classical liberal realism or the like, necessitating glorification of private ordering as the reason behind every tune.

Socialist realism remains the better fit. In a social ordering where the entire collective owns the state in whole, it’s fitting that that ownership extend even to the artistic realm. If all property must serve the collective, why should the artistic talents of citizens be exempt? There is one choice that matters in the communist system, that of the proletariat as a whole, however operationalized, and what does not serve that choice must per force be waste.

No wonder Stalin thought chamber music anti-democratic—it was intimate, intellectual. The elite appreciate it, and only through careful thought and reflection. The masses have no use for it, and that’s not fair, as the masses had been exploited enough.. No wonder Prokofiev vented in piano sonatas—where one man could sit by himself with the keyboard.

Prokofiev’s ultimate sin was keeping something of himself for himself.

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