Prokofiev Biography: Enfant Terrible (1904-1914)

Summary

Childhood (1891-1904)

Enfant Terrible: The Conservatory Years (1904-1914)

Exploration and Revolution (1914-1918)

America and Europe (1918-1932)

Return Home (1933-1941)

The War (1941-1945)

Twilight (1945-1953)

Further Reading...


	St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1912. [link]		Now thirteen years old, Prokofiev began his formal musical training in St. Petersburg. Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936), noted Russian composer and professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, heard Sergei and suggested he apply. Gliere helped him prepare and in September 1904, Prokofiev took the Conservatory entrance examination. In his memoirs, Prokofiev wrote: The entrance examination was quite sensational. The examinee before me was a man with a beard who had nothing to show the examiners but a single romance without accompaniment. Then I came in, bending under the weight of two huge folders containing four operas, two sonatas, a symphony and a good many pianoforte pieces. 'Here is a pupil after my own heart!' observed Rimsky-Korsakov, who headed the examining board. Prokofiev was accepted -- the youngest student ever to be admitted. He was a young boy in the greatest musical conservatory in Russia amongst men and women twice his age. His most well-known teachers in the Conservatory, Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Anatol Liadov, were respected, if not erudite, composers stuck in the shadow of the earlier Russian greats Mikhail Glinka (1803-1857) and Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1891). Prokofiev strove to develop his own style -- his memoirs indicate that even in his early Conservatory years he was self-confident, generally critical of his fellow students, yet disapproving of criticism he often received from his teachers. His unfailing belief in his own innovative musical style and his criticism of fellow students was interpreted as arrogance by many around him. This arrogance and propensity to shock his teachers with his music earned him the reputation as an 'enfant terrible' -- a label Prokofiev actually enjoyed.

In 1906, Prokofiev met Nikolai Miaskovsky, another student in the Conservatory who was ten years his elder. A seemingly unlikely match, they quickly became best friends -- bonded by an intense interest in new music. Bored and disenchanted with the music of the Russian standard-bearers Glazunov and Glinka, whom their teachers championed, Miaskovsky and Prokofiev drew inspiration instead from composers such as Max Reger and Alexander Scriabin. Miaskovsky and Prokofiev would remain friends until Miaskovsky's death over forty years later. They attended concerts, played duets, and more importantly, tried out their new compositions on each other. Miaskovsky was vital in providing support and critical advice to Prokofiev. Sergei was by now a prolific composer -- drawing extensively from the notebooks he so meticulously maintained during his youth.

At the same time, Prokofiev was also developing a formidable piano technique. He played his first public performance on 18-December-1908 in St. Petersburg at one of the 'Evenings of Contemporary Music.' These weekly concerts were disorganized affairs in appearance, but critically important in the avant-garde of musical Europe. Most of the city's leading composers, musicians and music critics attended the concerts. The list of composers who played at the series is a veritable 'Who's Who' of contemporary Russian music at the time -- Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Miaskovsky. At his debut performance, Prokofiev performed his own compositions, most notably four pieces which were later to be published as Opus 4: Reminiscence, Elan, Despair and Diabolic Suggestions. The performance was a rousing success. Critics and composers from around Europe took note.

Prokofiev continued to play at the 'Evenings of Contemporary Music,' as well as continuing to frustrate his teachers in the Conservatory. He received only passing marks in composition. While his music was undoubtedly too advanced at the time for most of his composition and music theory professors, he at least caught the eye of his piano and conducting teachers. In 1909, Glazunov wrote of one of Prokofiev's examinations:

Technical preparation exceedingly brilliant. Interpretation unique, original, but not always in the best artist taste...

Prokofiev completed his composition courses in 1909 to disapproving reviews by his teachers, but he was invited back to take courses in piano and conducting. He studied piano under Anna Esipova and Nikolai Tcherepnin from 1909 to 1914. Undaunted by the criticism from his professors, Prokofiev continued to write music on his own. During this time his works are characterized by continued brilliance at the piano (e.g. Piano Concertos No. 1 & 2, Toccata Op. 11 in D Minor), and a struggle to master new forms (the one-act opera Maddalena, and several sketches for Orchestra including Autumnal and Dreams).

While the poor reception accorded his early orchestral works in this period (Dreams, Autumnal, and Maddalena) temporarily tarnished the luster on his rising star, he took the criticism in stride. Prokofiev's darkest days in this period followed the death of his father in 1910. Although he had left Sontsovka when he was five, he regularly corresponded with his father and returned home during the summers.

It was perhaps this confluence of events that inspired him to re-establish his reputation as a formidable composer-pianist. The vehicle for him to do this was his first Piano Concerto. He later called it his "first more or less mature composition as regards to conception and fulfillment." He premiered the work on 07-August-1912 at a summer concert in Sokolniki, a suburb of Moscow. The public reaction was positive, the critical reaction scathing. When the composer premiered the work in the United States six years later, New York Times music critic James Gibbons Huneker shredded the work:

The First Piano Concerto of Prokofiev was in one movement, but compounded of many rhythms and recondite noises...The first descending figure -- it is hardly a theme -- is persistently affirmed in various nontonalities by the orchestra, the piano all the while shrieking, groaning, howling, fighting back, and in several instances it seemed to rear and bite the hand that chastised it...There were moments when the piano and orchestra made sounds that evoked not only the downfall of empires, but also of fine crockery, the fragments flying in all directions. He may be the Cossack Chopin for the next generation -- this tall, calm young man. The diabolic smiles press upon you as his huge hands, the hands of a musical primate, tear up trees and plow the soil. That fetching, old expression, 'Hell to pay and no pitch hot,' applies to Prokofiev: only he owns his Hades and has the necessary pitch in abundance.

In contrast to other composers such as Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky who wilted under critical assaults, Prokofiev welcomed the disapproving reviews. Throughout his career, in fact he would purposely push the limits of his compositions, all the while provoking and shocking listeners and critics. He relished his role as 'enfant terrible' of the music world.

He completed his Second Piano Concerto in 1912, and its premiere in Pavlosk on 05-September caused even more of an uproar than did the First. Music critic N. Bernstein called the work:

a cacophony of sounds that has nothing in common with civilized music...Prokofiev's cadenzas, for example, are unbearable. They are such a musical mess that one might think they were created by capriciously emptying an inkwell on the paper.

Prokofiev entered his tenth and last term in the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1913 at age 22. His teachers had long abandoned any hope of making a 'proper' composer of him. Liberated from the short-sightedness of his composition teachers, Prokofiev eyed instead the one goal that he could still attain in the Conservatory -- the coveted Anton Rubinstein Prize awarded to the best student pianist. Knowing the risk it entailed, Prokofiev again stirred the waters by daring to perform his own work. He chose to play his First Piano Concerto, thinking the Second would be "too outlandish within the Conservatoire walls." Prokofiev recalled the final examination recital:

At my request, Jurgenson printed the piano score of the First Concerto in time for the examination. I bought 20 copies and distributed them to the examiners. When I came out on the stage the first thing I saw was my concerto spread out on 20 laps -- an unforgettable sight for a composer who has just begun to appear in print! My most serious competitor was Golubovskaya...a very subtle and intelligent pianist. We were extremely gallant and courteous to each other: on the eve of the examination we inquired after the condition of each other's fingers, and in the long hours of suspense while the judges were deciding our fate, we played chess. After a long and stormy session the prize was awarded to me...

It was vintage Prokofiev -- to hell with tradition. He would do it his way and he would succeed. Thus ended a tumultuous, but ultimately triumphant ten years in the St. Petersburg Conservatory.