Daniel Jaffé is a writer and Reviews Editor for Classic CD, the British classical music magazine. Born in Cambridge, England, he studied music at Southampton University. His biography of Prokofiev was published by Phaidon Press in 1998 (see right.) Daniel is also Secretary of the Serge Prokofiev Association, a group affiliated with the Serge Prokofiev Foundation and the Serge Prokofiev Archive.

In Part I of our interview with Daniel, he talks about the Archive, the soon-to-be-launched Prokofiev Association, his book, other Prokofiev biographies, and, most importantly, Prokofiev. Among the revelations in this interview, Daniel discusses Prokofiev's interest in jazz music and the hardships he endured composing during Stalin's Terror. He also helps clarify several of the most pernicious misconceptions about Prokofiev and his music.

Prokofiev.org: I understand that you were a composer. Tell us about your musical background, both as a performer and a composer.

Daniel Jaffé: I grew up listening to classical music, and little else since my parents - neither of whom are musicians - almost totally banned pop music from our home. I guess some kids would have felt stifled by this, but I actually flourished. Inevitably I was introduced to Peter and the Wolf, but didn't discover Romeo and Juliet until I was about nine or ten, when I heard and was very impressed by a recording of "Death of Tybalt". Before that I was much more exposed to things like Britten's operas and Bartok's string quartets, as well as Mussorgsky and Ravel.

From the age of five I had a splendid piano teacher called Peter Uppard, who used to compose little pieces specially for me to learn - sometimes on the spot immediately before or after my lesson. His example inspired me to give it a try, and I wrote a handful of rather basic piano pieces. But I didn't really take my efforts at composition seriously until I was about 17, and suddenly there was tremendous fuss over a boy about two or three years younger than me who was composing symphonies. He had a little chamber piece performed at a school concert, and I thought "I can do that!" So I wrote a piece for flute and piano which was performed at the next school concert and was very warmly received.

Then when I was at university I was asked to compose a piece for a composers' concert, so I wrote a Missa Brevis which both choir and audience were very enthusiastic about. With this encouragement, I carried on composing through my university career, and even hoped to take it to post-graduate level. I then showed my music to the composer Robin Holloway, who politely but devastatingly told me that he thought my music crude and that he thought I was trying to do what Duruflé had already done more successfully.

I've composed a few pieces since then, usually when asked to, but Robin's crushing judgement rather quashed what ambitions I had to become a composer! On the other hand, I feel my experience in composing has given me some insight into what composers are dealing with when creating music, which has been really helpful when interviewing heroes of mine such as Oliver Knussen, Jonathan Harvey and Simon Bainbridge. And, dare I say, perhaps gave me some extra perception of Prokofiev's work!

You are also Secretary of the Serge Prokofiev Association. What is the purpose of the Serge Prokofiev Association and how does it relate to the Serge Prokofiev Foundation and the Serge Prokofiev Archive at Goldsmith's College?

I should first say that the Serge Prokofiev Association is still in the process of being set up: Noëlle Mann, the curator of the Serge Prokofiev Archive (more on that anon), first proposed that such an organisation be created back in 1998, and it is only this year that its committee has been formed! The committee includes, apart from Noëlle and myself, Serge Prokofiev, son of the composer's eldest son Sviatoslav; Sir Edward Downes, the distinguished conductor who has already done invaluable work in promoting Prokofiev's music, including the completion of his opera Maddalena; and the pianist Leslie Howard.

The main purpose of the Serge Prokofiev Association, to be launched later this year, will be to promote public awareness of Prokofiev's life and music. We will be publicising concerts, recordings and exhibitions - whether initiated by ourselves or not - to this end. Also later this year we will be launching the inaugural issue of the Association's journal, "Three Oranges", edited by Noëlle Mann, which will contain original articles on Prokofiev, his music and his associates; relevant reviews of concerts, books and recordings; and advance notice of special events and promotions.

The "mother" of the Serge Prokofiev Association, in effect, is Prokofiev's widow, Lina, who settled in London and created the Serge Prokofiev Foundation in order to encourage and enable scholarly study of Prokofiev's life and work. At the heart of this is the Serge Prokofiev Archive, based in Goldsmiths College, University of London: this houses not only a substantial collection of Prokofiev's correspondence but also scores, books, periodicals, recordings, pictures and photographs - in short, an invaluable resource for Prokofiev scholars. Incidentally I believe my book was the first published to make use of the Archive's resources. The Serge Prokofiev Association, in effect, will be the public face of the Foundation, stimulating interest in Prokofiev's music and offering members several benefits, including access to the Archive.

I understand that the Prokofiev Association is about to launch a new website, with the involvement of Serge Prokofiev, Jr., the composer's grandson. Tell us about the the new site and the plans for the Association.

The website is still in the process of being developed, but when launched we intend it to be effectively a noticeboard for events promoted by the Association: an on-line newsletter, if you like. It will also be an attractive "display window" for the Association - I think Serge has done a wonderful job in designing the site, with plenty of attractive pictures of Prokofiev and his circle, and he's now waiting for me to provide its text.

Your wonderful biography was published by Phaidon Press in 1998. It is your first book, as I understand. What was your motivation for writing the book? How long did it take?

As a teenager, as I mention in the Preface of my book, I fell in love with Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto, and desperately wanted to learn more about the man behind such entrancing music. I checked out my local library, and found plenty of frankly fairly sketchy accounts of his life but couldn't find anything which seemed to really engage with the music.

So I guess my desire to find a decent book on Prokofiev ultimately became my motivation to write one myself. But I probably would have waited until I was "a little older and wiser" if it hadn't been for Ian MacDonald, the author of The New Shostakovich. I first knew him (by phone and letter: I don't know anyone who's actually met him!) when I was scarcely a journalist but a budding reviewer of performances and recordings of classical music. When I started writing a lot for Classic CD Ian, who did some freelance editing for Classic CD, really liked my style. So when he was approached by Norman Lebrecht to write the Prokofiev book as part of Phaidon's "Twentieth-century composers" series, and was too busy to take it on, he suggested that I should do it.

This was a considerable leap of faith for him, as I had then - as far as he knew - written nothing more substantial than 400 word reviews: I hadn't even at that time written a full length article! Naturally I was flattered, but rather daunted at such a prospect, but decided to go for it. This was the summer of 1994, when I wrote a synopsis and a couple of sample chapter openings for Phaidon to look at.

Some months later, having heard nothing from Phaidon, I'd pretty much given up hope and had moved to Bath to work full-time for Classic CD, when Phaidon wrote saying they would like me to do the book. I had a meeting with Roger Sears, who was then looking after the series from Phaidon's end, and he rather alarmed me by suggesting that I could write the book within a year. There were problems with the contract, which actually gave me time to get going with the research, since I got them to change the delivery date to a year after my signing the contract.

The first person I called on was Prokofiev's son, Oleg, who was living no further away than in London! It seems obvious to say that he was the most important source of help for my book, but he really spent many hours, several mornings sharing his memories and his knowledge of his father's life. Then he dug out this veritable treasure trove of family photographs for me and Phaidon's picture researcher to go through when choosing illustrations for the book. He even - at his own insistence - took time to read through the penultimate galleys.

In the end it actually took me about two and a half years to write the book. Partly this was due to having to write the book in my spare time on top of doing a full-time job as Classic CD's reviews editor. It was also my first book, and I think Phaidon were quite patient in coping with my getting to grips with fitting Prokofiev's event-packed life into just over 200 pages!

I assume this meant you had to edit out material you would have otherwise like to have left in. Are there any discoveries, revelations or other stories that were left out that you'd like to share with our readers?

No stories as such - though I'm aware that there's still a heck of a lot of research that needs to be done, particularly with all the papers held at the Serge Prokofiev Archive. (Noëlle Mann, and also David Nice who's working on a biography of Prokofiev, are continuing this work.) I unfortunately just didn't have the time or the space to go into so much detail.

A number of people have commented on the fact my book seems to flow better as it goes along: basically that's because I was getting a better feel as I wrote of just how much information I could fit in to the space I had, so the most vigorous cutting was in the first few chapters! I do regret, though, having to leave out so much about the Sontsovka estate Prokofiev grew up in. Because of his happy childhood there, he had a particular attachment to the Ukrainian steppes and its seasons: he describes the verdure at some length in his autobiography, and I think an aspect of the man was lost by my text being vigorously cut at that point! I've just been reminded of this as I've been listening to Gergiev's wonderful new recording of Semyon Kotko, which includes at the beginning of Act 3 a seductive portrayal of a balmy summer's night on the Ukrainian steppes.

The other thing was because of the book's set length and the limited time I had to write it in, I didn't pursue certain avenues which looked interesting but appeared not to be so essential to the central narrative. So it's only after the book's publication that I've really started to follow through the implications of Prokofiev's enthusiasm for jazz - nowhere mentioned in my book - which I'm now convinced strongly influenced much of his music written in the Soviet Union, or even as far back as his ballet The Prodigal Son.

Jazz -- yes. Harlow Robinson wrote that Prokofiev had at least a hundred jazz recordings in his record collection. Prokofiev also wrote about Americans and jazz in an article written in the Soviet music journal Internatsionalnaya Literatura in 1939. It obviously interested him, but what little we have in writing about his thoughts on jazz is more ambivalent. He seems to point out much that he likes about the genre and particularly the skill of American jazz musicians. But then he writes that jazz "seems to stand aside from truly great music." The Fourth Piano Concerto reveals jazz-like rhythms, although that was written before his return to the Soviet Union. Aside from The Prodigal Son, which other works do you think indicate jazz influences?

Like I said, I'm still a relative novice when it comes to jazz, but what I understand is that when Prokofiev wrote that article, jazz had taken quite a battering in the Soviet Union. Many of the best jazz musicians had been arrested and even shot during Stalin's purges, not because their work as musicians was necessarily disapproved of, but simply because many of them had had extensive contact with musicians in the West. But what made jazz a sensitive issue was precisely its runaway popularity in the Soviet Union (and elsewhere) in the early 1930s: this popularity had been particularly exaggerated under Stalin since everyone wanted to let their hair down after the nightmare effort of the first Five-Year Plan. The trouble was that jazz became popular at the expense of musicians offering other forms of popular music and of orchestras performing what might be called "light classics".

There's a fascinating book by S. Frederick Starr called Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union which goes into some detail about this. According to statistics he quotes, an orchestral musician would earn around 500 rubles a month in 1934, whilst a star jazz player could earn tens of thousands in the same month, and his sidemen salaries of around 5,000 a month. Naturally there was a good deal of resentment, and when a push came to suppress jazz there were thousands of struggling musicians all too willing to put the boot in. The government seems to have taken the opportunity to stifle the more individualistic, sexy elements of jazz, while attempting to offer the public an ersatz version through the creation of the State Jazz Orchestra, which made its debut in November 1938. Their repertoire was basically foxtrots, recycled works by Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Kreisler, Shostakovich's Suite for Jazz Band and what Starr calls "a watered-down rendition of Duke Ellington's Caravan." On the other hand, "legitimate" musicians suddenly gained new privileges including access to "closed shops", dachas and chauffeured cars. Given these circumstances it's not surprising that Prokofiev couched his writing on jazz in ambivalent terms: what is remarkable, though, is that he not only suggested that jazz was a worthwhile form of music to study, but he also praised authentic American jazz in implicit contrast to the bland fare approved by Stalin's government.

As for his music, his Quintet of 1924 contains some very jazzy-sounding bass playing - Prokofiev's French biographer Dorigné compares its style to that of Count Basie's bass player Walter Page. I'm a little wary, though, of saying definitively that the Quintet was jazz-influenced since Walter Page, for one, only became famous quite a while after Prokofiev wrote that work, so it may in this instance be more a case of Prokofiev anticipating that style of jazz playing!

On the other hand one could imagine that Prokofiev took opportunities to hear jazz during his many tours through the States - certainly he brought plenty of jazz records back to Russia; and it would be consistent with his desire that his music should be contemporary that he should incorporate elements of that up-to-the-minute urban music. The strange colours of the so-called 'American' Overture, for instance, with its honky-tonk piano sound and predominant brass and woodwind colours sounds to me like a "take" on the sound of a jazz combo, though not using its rhythmic style. Jazzy harmonies unmistakably appear in Romeo and Juliet and in his so-called "War" sonatas. Basically it's a far more subtle and subliminal influence than, say, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring on the Scythian Suite, or Honegger's Pacific 231 on Prokofiev's Second Symphony: but perhaps the "failure" of that latter work in particular had some effect on the way Prokofiev afterwards tended to take hints from other musics rather than appropriating a style wholesale.