Page 2 of 2 (Click here for Page 1.)

by Sugi Sorensen, Prokofiev.org editor

26-Jun-2000

In your biography, you do a particularly exquisite job following Prokofiev's circuitous travels from Russia to France and Germany, as well as his many trips to the United States and around Europe. In writing the biography did you re-trace any of his steps? If so, what new revelations did you discover in your travels?

Alas, I had precious little time to do any travelling. As I've said I was doing a full-time job as reviews editor with Classic CD, and originally Phaidon gave me no more than a year to write the book! So I had to write the book in my spare evenings, weekends and during holidays. A lot of my information about Prokofiev's movements initially came from Harlow Robinson, who had done a tremendous amount of groundwork in his biography, actually travelling to Russia and examining archives held there. I was very fortunate, though, in that many relevant papers are held at the Serge Prokofiev Archive: the core of their collection is a comprehensive set of Prokofiev's correspondence from around 1920, when he was living in the West, to 1936 when he and his family moved to the Soviet Union: it really has pretty much everything, including copies Prokofiev made of all his letters to friends and colleagues, bills, and even such things as a letter from the headmistress of his son Sviatoslav's nursery school, telling Prokofiev there is a sweater to be picked up!

The other invaluable source were papers left behind by the late Christopher Palmer, who'd been working on his own biography of Prokofiev. These included papers left by Lina Prokofieva, who'd long been planning her account of her years with Sergey. She'd also written an account of Prokofiev's early years in Tsarist Russia, including his journey to America. It was from her papers that I got such stories as Prokofiev having to disguise himself as a peasant when escaping St Petersburg after the first revolution of 1917, and also about his being bailed out by Chicago's Russian community when he arrived in the States. And Oleg Prokofiev was invaluable in filling in several missing details, correcting a number of errors I had unwittingly gathered from Robinson's book. So the result, through the good help of several hands, is probably the most accurate account of Prokofiev's movements published in English to date.

Are there plans by anyone to complete the work of Christopher Palmer and Lina Prokofieva, or does your book fulfill that endeavor?

Although a lot of people were looking forward to Christopher Palmer's book - he wrote beautifully and was clearly a great fan of Prokofiev's work - the papers he left do not suggest that he got much further than collating various typescripts of interviews - not necessarily conducted by himself (I seem to remember Harvey Sachs did at least one of them) - with Lina Prokofieva, and several of Lina's papers including her attempts to write a memoir of her late husband. As I said, Lina's papers were invaluable for my own book, but when it comes to her account of her husband's life in the Soviet Union I was rather wary as - quite understandably - Lina had a massive axe to grind when it came to Mira Mendelsohn! Having said this, my account of the weeks leading up to Lina's separation from her husband are very much based on her testimony given in interview; I don't go along with her theory, though, that Mira belonged to some nefarious organisation of young women who deliberately and cold-bloodedly chose to seduce several famous older men: I think the evidence suggests that Mira was genuinely attached to Prokofiev and stuck loyally to him, even when his name officially became dirt in 1948.

So to answer your question, while I think there's a lot of invaluable first-hand material in Lina's papers, I'm not sure they should be published without considerable editorial input or intervention, as I think one cannot accept everything she wrote or said at face value - particularly when she is writing about Mira. But then I guess someone else looking at her papers is bound to give a different slant from mine on what's important and what's less trustworthy.

You mentioned errors in Robinson's book in your book as well. What were the most grievous errors?

To be honest, I'm rather embarassed by what I wrote about Robinson's book, particularly the phrase "sadly riddled with inaccuracies". While there is a fair sprinkling of mostly quite minor but easily avoidable errors in his work, I must admit that my rather harsh criticism was partly due to a misunderstanding. In his biography Robinson suggests that Nijinsky was originally to have choreographed Prokofiev's Ala i Lolli - which appeared to me a total impossibility, as when Prokofiev first met Diaghilev in 1914, the impresario had badly fallen out with Nijinsky over the dancer's marriage to Romola de Pulszky; Diaghilev in a fit of pique had severed all connection with Nijinsky before he even met Prokofiev. But now I've looked into the matter, it appears Diaghilev did hope, after this falling out, to entice Nijinsky back with a major ballet: he not only talked of using him to choreograph Prokofiev's first ballet - as revealed in Robinson's mostly excellent Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev (published almost simultaneously with my book) - but also later wrote to Stravinsky about the possibility of Nijinsky working on Les Noces. Unfortunately Robinson say anything about Diaghilev's falling out with Nijinsky, and manages in Selected Letters to erroneously credit Nijinsky as the choreographer of Constant Lambert's 1926 ballet Romeo and Juliet, though Nijinsky was at that time throwing himself out of windows and was seriously ill mentally (the choreography was by his sister, Bronislava Nijinska).

I think my main beef about Robinson's book is that he undermines his invaluable research - and possibly its credibility in some people's eyes - with his carelessness over detail. For instance Robinson says Prokofiev was too ill to attend the first performance of his Cello Sonata, though both Rostropovich (who performed) and Oleg have testified to the contrary. Perhaps a rather more serious shortcoming of Robinson's book is his comments about the music, which are not particularly revealing or incisive (that's not to mention howlers such as his description of the First Quartet's central movement as "slow"!) - the music is surely the main reason most of us are interested in Prokofiev in the first place. We need more decent writing about his actual music. Unfortunately, as was clear to me when I studied music at university, there's a widespread belief that Prokofiev is a kind of crude version of Stravinsky and so not worth taking seriously. Having studied Prokofiev's music for my book, I know it repays the effort - though goodness knows, he's generally one of the most attractive composers on first hearing - and I'm absolutely convinced he deserves better. I think if people take care in researching and writing about him, this is bound to reflect all the better on their subject and to greatly help in raising Prokofiev's profile as a composer worth spending time and energy on.

We shouldn't pick on Robinson in particular -- his research and writings are invaluable to our understanding of Prokofiev and there have been many continuing debates about allegations made in other biographies, particularly by Victor Seroff and Prokofiev's "official" biographer, Israel Nestyev. In general, what other major misconceptions about Prokofiev do you think you've dispelled?

I think the two most persistent and pernicious misconceptions are 1) that he was utterly self-centred and not in the least interested in promoting of other people's music unless he had something to gain by it (a myth peddled by John Drummond in his book on Diaghilev, for instance); 2) that he was some venal toady to Stalin and his regime. Professor Richard Taruskin, for instance - a highly respected musicologist who has written extensively on Russian music, including his magnum opus Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions - has gone out of his way to rubbish Prokofiev.

In one article in the New York Times Taruskin wrote this about Prokofiev's Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of October and Zdravitsa ("Hail to Stalin"): "there was no ideological gun pointed at Prokofiev's head ... He wrote these pieces for the money, and for the privilege of touring in the West, as many post-Soviet musicians now concede". What a gratuitously insulting thing to say! Leaving aside the fact the pieces didn't gain Prokofiev any such privileges, the fact is that he wrote Zdravitsa - at the request of the All-Soviet Union Radio Committee - immediately in the wake of Meyerhold's arrest: Meyerhold, one should remember, had been about to produce Prokofiev's latest opera, Semyon Kotko, which Prokofiev had written specially for him.

The general pattern during Stalin's purges was that if anyone was arrested, they would be forced to confess to some heinous crime of national treachery, and implicate several in their circle; the upshot was that if you had been at all friendly with someone who'd been arrested, there was a good chance you'd be next on the NKVD list. Of course it wasn't courageous of Prokofiev to write Zdravitsa, but he had a family to support and quite understandably preferred to save his skin rather than go in for futile heroics: the extraordinary thing is that when the chips were down, Prokofiev proved himself able to produce such beautiful music even in those circumstances.

Normally, as I think is evident from the bitter music he wrote for Stalin's speeches in his October Cantata, Prokofiev wouldn't have made such a sacrifice of his integrity and given Stalin such yearnfully beautiful music. But he really on this occasion had no other option - at least not one that would not have lost his family their bread-winner. His true feelings, as I say in my book, were released afterwards in his Sixth Piano Sonata - one of the most demonic pieces of music he ever wrote!

I think I've explained all this in my book, though as to the first point - about Prokofiev promoting other people's music - I've learnt a lot more in the last couple of years. Noëlle Mann mentioned recently that she'd come across letters from Prokofiev to the Soviet Composers' Union, trying to persuade them to allow William Walton's music to be performed - a rather nice touch, since Walton's music was in some respects indebted to Prokofiev's.

What about Prokofiev's own autobiographies? In your book, you caution that these autobiographies should be "treated with caution" and that "some events are conflated or chronologically dislocated." Explain what you meant.

To be honest, I can't remember specific examples. Generally I got the impression from the odd statement that Prokofiev had confused some of the events he recalled, but really that's inevitable given that many of the events he was writing about happened over 30 years earlier. To put it into perspective, I think his autobiography is considerably more reliable than Stravinsky's published conversations with Craft, not least because Stravinsky and Craft did not have the benefit of the kind of first-hand documentary material that Prokofiev and his mother had amassed from his earliest years and which Prokofiev referred to when writing his autobiography.

You make some controversial conclusions about Prokofiev's motives as well, particularly after he returned to the Soviet Union. You claim Prokofiev used symbolic codes in his music to communicate his disenchantment with Stalin and aspects of the Soviet system. For example, in the October Cantata you claim Prokofiev intended to show the hypocrisy of Stalin and Lenin, rather than glorify Bolshevism as the work was supposed to do. You imply similar motifs possibly at work in the opera War and Peace, the film music to Eisenstein's 'Ivan the Terrible', the 'War Sonatas,' and perhaps even in the First Sonata for Violin and Piano. Given thousands were executed and arrested for flimsier reasons, given the fact that Prokofiev's close friend Vesvolod Meyerhold was arrested and tortured (and later executed although Prokofiev didn't know it at the time) following the untimely production of Semyon Kotko, given the fact that some works had to be abandon because of political disfavor, do you believe Prokofiev would have risked his own life with such subversive motives?

Hmm, I don't remember saying there are hidden codes in War and Peace! But yes, on all other charges I plead guilty. The evidence that Prokofiev used meaningful quotations in his music - Rimsky-Korsakov's Astrologer's Music in his Seventh Symphony, Delilah's aria (by Saint-Saens) in his cantata On Guard for Peace, Schumann's "Wehmuth" in the opening of the slow movement of his Seventh Sonata - is too extensive to allow any argument that Prokofiev meant nothing extra-musical in his work to wash. As for risking his life, I think Prokofiev, with many other artists, felt that no matter what the risk any self-respecting creative artist had to be able to express what they were experiencing.

Just recently I read an article by Arthur Miller, who says that during the McCarthy years in America he had to translate what was happening into his own writings for his own sanity. (The result, as we know, was The Crucible.) Prokofiev was first of all a creative artist, and moreover one who believed that a great artist had to express what was fresh and true to life - even before his return to Russia he did not hesitate to damn the works of his teacher Glazunov, which he regarded as derivative and moribund. Under Stalin he couldn't deny something as all-enveloping as the Terror without being untrue to himself: willy-nilly, the Terror - where everyone knew someone who'd been arrested - insinuated itself into everybody's life. But Prokofiev's music does not merely reflect its times but also responds to them.

There's an expression in Russia - "giving the finger in one's pocket". Prokofiev did not necessarily intend all or any of his codes to be recognised, even by fellow musicians, but he evidently wanted to "get back" at the Soviet authorities with a private act of defiance. Hence the "Wehmuth" quotation in the Seventh Sonata - about a nightingale which sings as if it's happy but is in fact imprisoned and in misery. So many people have commented on the opening of that slow movement and, not recognising the quotation, have complained that it sounds so retrogressive in style; but this anachronism - if you like - is not only Prokofiev harkening back to a more civilised life, but is also his way of alerting those musicians who knew such "bourgeois" music to this Schumann quotation, which he just lightly jazzed up with the kind of bluesy harmonies he'd learnt from Duke Ellington.

In all this, I think Prokofiev was taking a calculated risk. Of course I cannot conclusively "prove" this - Prokofiev was not so foolish as to broadcast his intentions - so I can only point to the music itself. I wish, by the way, I'd heard Mark Elder's brilliant performance of the October Cantata, which he gave at the London Proms in 1998, before I wrote my book: it has such a gloriously rah-rah upbeat end that it had the audience absolutely wild - and I realised then that if Prokofiev had got the work performed he would have got away with it.

I should add that although I stand by what I said in the book, there is one error which I'd like to correct here: the Russian text which opens the final movement (of the October Cantata) does not mean "It gives us pleasure and joy" (something which in my haste I lifted from the first line of an English translation), but "As a result of following the path"; which actually is more revealing, as the grating dissonance on the word "puti" ("path") indicates Prokofiev's attitude to Stalin's choice of path which led to the unveiling of the impressively worded but essentially ineffective Constitution.

The First Violin Sonata is certainly a protest piece. Prokofiev got away with it since it was completed after the Second World War, or "Great Patriotic War" as the Russians call it, so there were obvious reasons to write great tragic works. But Prokofiev actually started the work well before the Second World War, at the height of Stalin's purges. Prokofiev himself described the rushing violin scales which appear towards the end of the first and last movements as being "like the wind in a graveyard". Of course it could equally refer to the dreadful death toll of the war years. But Prokofiev first conceived the music in 1938, the year in which millions were arrested and shot, and the year in which Bukharin, said to be the greatest Bolshevik intellectual and widely credited with having written the Constitution for which Stalin took credit, was put on trial for being allegedly part of the "Right-Trotskyite Centre". Literally noone could afford to feel safe. And it was in that year, incidentally, that Meyerhold's theatre was finally closed: one can appreciate why Prokofiev was eager to try to help his old friend by writing an opera using a plot not so distantly related to that of the highly successful Alexander Nevsky. Composing both the latter and Semyon Kotko were the reasons why Prokofiev temporarily shelved his Violin Sonata.

[You can buy Daniel Jaffé's book here. You can email Daniel at:

danieljaffe@musicwrite.demon.co.uk