Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography, Harlow Robinson's 1987 biography of Prokofiev was recently re-issued by Northeastern University Press (see right.) The book is widely considered the most authoritative and revealing English-language biography about Prokofiev. The Washington Post Book World wrote:

Harlow Robinson's biography of the composer is the fullest account to date, a thoughtful study of a puzzling personality in and out of music and a comprehensive history of the East-West cultural curtain as it constrained the life and work of the one major artists who had been active on both of its sides...the best-written biography of a modern composer.

Robinson is Professor of Modern Languages and History at Northeastern University. He has written two books on Prokofiev as well as a biography of ballet impresario Sol Hurok. In addition to teaching and writing books, Robinson contributes to many publications. As a music critic, he has written reviews and articles for The New York Times, New York Post, Musical America, Musical Quarterly, Opera News, Dance, Stagebill, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Opera Quarterly and others.

Prokofiev.org: Tell us a little about yourself. I understand you play both violin and piano. What is your musical background? Do you still play?

Harlow Robinson: I come from a family that has always been involved with music. My grandmother was a choral conductor and pianist, and I remember my first introduction to the piano from her when I was three or four years old. My mother studied piano for many years with private teachers in Massachusetts and at Middlebury College in Vermont, and was my first teacher, beginning when I was about five years old. (Sounds like Prokofiev!) Then I studied the piano with private teachers (including a wonderful German emigree, Mrs.Vogel) for about twenty years after that, through college and graduate school. We have a piano at home now, but I'm afraid I haven't been playing too much lately. My two brothers also studied music--clarinet and trumpet.

When I was about ten years old, I started playing the violin, too, and played violin in school orchestras through high school, taking private lessons. I played the violin fairly seriously for about ten years or so.

Also, I always sang, I have a tenor voice. In grammar school and high school I sang in all the choral groups, and often starred in the productions of plays and musicals, and was chosen for the All-Connecticut Chorus. At Yale as an undergraduate I sang in the Freshman Glee Club, and then for three years in the wonderful Yale Russian Chorus, which toured nationally and even to Russia in 1970 (I was the business manager). We sang folk and liturgical music, and this was a very important introduction for me to the musical and spiritual aspects of Russian and Eastern European culture. In graduate school at UC Berkeley, I sang in several groups in the Music Department, and I had a professional job for several years as the member of a quartet singing the liturgy (in Old Church Slavonic) in a small Russian Orthodox church in San Francisco. Later, I sang in New York with the Yale Russian Alumni Chorus and in a church choir in Albany, NY.

So music has been an important part of my life since my early childhood. At Yale, I took several courses in music history, and some more at Berkeley, and then an extension course at the Juilliard School on theory and harmony.

In recent years, I have been a regular pre-concert lecturer for The Boston Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra and Lincoln Center. I have also written program notes and essays for these groups (especially on Russian music), and liner notes for numerous recordings (mainly of Russian music). I have also helped to plan and organize several festivals of Russian/Soviet music with various groups, including the Manhattan String Quartet, Borodin String Quartet, Emerson String Quartet, New York Philharmonic and others.

In the preface to your exquisite biography of Prokofiev, you state the first opera you ever saw was the Love for Three Oranges. You were ten at the time. That must have been a memorable experience. Was this your introduction to Prokofiev's music? Surely you must have heard Peter and the Wolf earlier? What was your impression of his music and what effect did it have on you?

As I describe in the introduction to my biography of Prokofiev, my first experience of opera happened to be a traveling production of Love for Three Oranges that came to Bristol High School in Bristol, Connecticut, where I grew up. I think it was a Community Concerts presentation. I think I was about ten years old. The strange scenery, especially the big oranges, made a big visual impression on me, and I liked Prokofiev's sarcastic approach to fairy tales that my brother and I also enjoyed in the "Fractured Fairy Tales" episodes of the TV show "Rocky and His Friends" which was so popular around the same time. I was much more excited by this than by the many other classical music concerts to which my parents took my brothers and me, for some reason I could understand and relate to it more directly--I think the absurd humor and irreverence had a lot to do with it.

I'm sure I must have heard Peter and the Wolf by then, too, but it's strange that Oranges is the piece I really remember.

"Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography" was published in 1987. It was just re-released in paperback this year. This is fantastic news for many who missed your book the first time. Did you add any new material or revisions?

Yes, I am delighted that Northeastern University Press has reissued my book. Many people have been contacting me by e-mail, phone and letter to inquire about obtaining a copy in recent years; the book had been out of print (except in the Spanish-language version published by Javier Vergara Editor) since 1994. As you know, Northeastern University Press, under the leadership of William Frohlich, has published many distinguished books on music and opera, including Oleg's edition of Prokofiev's 1927 diary of his trip to the USSR, and my "Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev." It's funny but Frohlich signed me up to do the letters several years before I was hired at Northeastern as a Professor of Modern Languages. (I now have a joint appointment in Modern Languages and History, and teach courses on Russian Cultural History, Soviet Cinema, Film Music, Opera and Russian Literature.)

The reissue includes a new Foreword and a new Afterword. The Foreword discusses how certain issues of Prokofiev's biography have been reexamined in the post-Communist era. Some of this new material comes from interviews I conducted with Oleg Prokofiev and with Tikhon Khrennikov and others in recent years, and from Russian-language sources published since 1987, including new material authored by Alfred Schnittke.

The Afterword is a consideration of aspects of Prokofiev's musical style: his relationship to the history of twentieth-century Russian music; the impact of Soviet censorship on his music; his significance as an operatic composer; and his influence on the later generations of Soviet composers.

Otherwise the biography was reissued in its original form, with the correction of a few typos. Happily, as I looked very carefully through the book once again, I found that my presentation of Prokofiev's life and career remains accurate and sound.

I'm curious about the interview with Oleg and Khrennikov, and the more recent Russian-language material. Were there some misconceptions about Prokofiev's life in your original biography that have been corrected? Or have the Russians reconsidered or 're-habilitated' their views of Prokofiev?

I came to know Oleg Prokofiev very well over a period of nearly twenty years. We first met in London in the fall of 1978, when I was there on a Fulbright grant doing research on my dissertation on Prokofiev's operas, working in the Boosey and Hawkes archives and other sources. Over the subsequent years I saw him often when I was in London. He also came to New York on several occasions, and we appeared together several times there to talk about Prokofiev. In 1991 we did "An Evening of Conversation with Oleg Prokofiev and Harlow Robinson" for "Lincoln Center Off Stage," and in June 1995, we participated in a day-long symposium on Prokofiev for the New York Philharmonic, which was performing the score to Ivan the Terrible with screening of the film.

Oleg was a very perceptive and insightful individual, an accomplished artist in his own right, whose own life was considerably complicated by having such a famous father. Despite the many misfortunes he faced, however, Oleg never lost faith and hope, and cherished the memory of his father's great talent and significance. Oleg also helped me with finding material for my biography and for the letters collection, which he kindly read through and approved not long before his untimely death. At the New York Philharmonic symposium, he told of how difficult it had been for him and his brother Sviatoslav in the aftermath of the arrest of their mother Lina in early 1948, when they became virtually orphans, and so few people were willing to help them in attempting to get Lina out of prison and then the labor camp.

As for Khrennikov, I met him in Moscow in June 1997, at his huge apartment in the Arbat neighborhood, filled with mementos of his long and improbable career. As I relate in more detail in the foreword to the new 2002 edition of my biography of Prokofiev, in a bookcase I noticed a photo of Lina in her wedding dress. In the inscription she thanks Khrennikov for many years of friendship. It may seem odd that Lina would have developed a friendship with the bureaucrat who frequently attacked her husband for his ideological deficiencies, but such is the byzantine world of twentieth-century Russian music. And in fact I remember Lina telling me of Khrennikov's kindness to her when she finally returned to Moscow from the camps in the late 1950s.

"I was a person of my times," Khrennikov repeatedly told me. "It's very hard for anyone who did not live here through those times to understand them and the way we lived."

In his memoirs published in Russian in 1994, That's the Way It Was: Tikhon Khrennikov On Himself and His Times, which sold out almost immediately, Khrennikov devotes an entire chapter to his account of the 1948 Party attack upon composers, including Prokofiev. Khrennikov portrays his behavior as though he had no choice in the matter, as though he was a passive instrument of political forces and personalities beyond his control. He also notes that Prokofiev was present at the meetings convened by Zhdanov in February 1948 to make official the resolutions outlined at earlier meetings in January. This contradicts other versions of the conference, which assert that he did not attend.

Since the collapse of the USSR and of the powerful institutions of Soviet culture, there have been no significant new revelations about Prokofiev's life and career that I did not include in my biography, which was based on extensive interviews with his friends and family. At the same time, he has come under attack both in Russia and abroad for his implicit support of the evil Soviet regime -- just like Sergei Eisenstein and Dmitri Shostakovich have as well. All prominent cultural figures associated with the old regime came to be perceived in certain quarters as somehow tainted.

And yet those who have experienced the Soviet system firsthand have tended to be more generous. Soviet maestro Valery Gergiev, a tireless champion of Prokofiev's music both in Russia and abroad in the last decade, spoke eloquently to this issue at the official launch of the Serge Prokofiev Association as a formal foundation in London in May 2001. "I cannot agree with those who simplistically see Prokofiev's return to the Soviet Union as the biggest mistake of his life," Gergiev said. "If he had not returned, we would not have his Fifth Symphony, or Alexander Nevsky, or the Sixth Symphony, or War and Peace, and so many other great works that continue to find new audiences today."

With time, I think the view of Prokofiev will become more balanced. After all, he was also a victim of the terrible Soviet totalitarian system, and suffered under it like so many other brilliant and patriotic creative people.