Yesterday was the 71st anniversary of that day, 5 March. That’s when Sergei Prokofiev, one of the 20th century’s major composers and arguably Russia’s best ever, died a broken man.
He was only 61, but I did tell you he was broken. The inhuman pressure of life in Stalin’s Russia was too much for him to bear, and his heart gave way.
Hardly a day had gone by that Prokofiev hadn’t been publicly hectored and demonised by nonentities, calling him whatever they were paid to call great men in those days. He’d try to buy a moment’s peace by writing propagandist Soviet works, such as a fawning cantata to celebrate Stalin’s 60th birthday or one to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the revolution, but to no avail.
His genius shone through anyway, for genius remains free and irrepressible even with a yoke around his neck. Stalin’s bullies sensed that and went after Prokofiev like a pack of wolves pouncing on a wounded bear.
Prokofiev’s first wife Carolina (known as Lina) wasn’t a genius, but she was guilty of another irredeemable sin: she was Spanish, meaning foreign. And not just foreign, but one from a “capitalist”, at that time also “fascist”, country. She simply had to be charged with espionage and sentenced to 20 years of hard labour.
One might say that Prokofiev brought it all onto himself. After the revolution, he wisely left Russia, but unwisely returned in 1932. Anyone who has read the three volumes of his Diaries knows why.
Prokofiev and his contemporaneous West weren’t a good fit. On the one hand, he had to supplement his composing income by playing piano recitals, a career for which he was less equipped than his contemporary Rachmaninov, a lesser composer but one of the greatest piano virtuosos of his or any other time.
Prokofiev resented having to go on concert tours – like all geniuses, he knew his true worth. And there was another problem that made him disillusioned in the West: he knew his true worth, but the West didn’t, not quite. Prokofiev’s were essentially classicist sensibilities, but the West was demanding a different, atonal, modernist kind of music, best exemplified by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and – most painful to Prokofiev – Stravinsky, a fellow Russian émigré.
Stravinsky was another magnificent Russian export, and he was deservedly hogging the limelight. Yet Prokofiev, another genius, was denied his fair share of it, one he knew he merited. His pride was wounded, and there were those serpentine NKVD seducers begging him to return and promising him all the glory and riches of the world.
In the end, Prokofiev’s hubris got the better of him and return he did, to the living hell known as Stalin’s USSR. To be fair, at first the Soviets were as good as their word. Prokofiev was feted and lionised, he was encouraged to compose more and more works, and he no longer had to play recitals to survive.
But then the hounding started, shrill (and ignorant) accusations of formalism, demands for propagandist music, sleepless nights spent expecting that proverbial midnight knock on the door, illness. What the post-mortem diagnosed as cerebral haemorrhage finished the job.
Yet not a single Soviet newspaper ran an obituary for one of the few true giants associated with Stalin’s realm. And even the leading Soviet musical periodical only reported Prokofiev’s death in a couple of brief paragraphs.
Just think about it: the Soviet Union was home to only two sublime composers (Shostakovich was the other one), one of them died – and that tragic event barely merited the briefest of mentions on page 116 even in a musical periodical.
There was a good explanation for it: the first 115 pages were devoted to another death, that of Stalin, who died on the same day. Or, to be more exact, Stalin probably died a few days earlier, but his death was only reported to hoi polloi on 5 March. The diagnosis was the same, cerebral haemorrhage, but the circumstances of Stalin’s death were mysterious enough to give rise to rumours of assassination.
The country ignored the passing of one of its greatest gifts to world culture, but threw a fit of hysterical sorrow after one of the most evil men in history croaked. Crowds wept in the streets of Moscow, a human throng tried to crush its way into the Hall of Columns, where those malodorous remains lay in state.
Hundreds of people were trampled to death or had their heads smashed when the crowd threw them against the police vans. Even in his death, Stalin didn’t lose his endless capacity for mass murder.
I don’t know how many of today’s Russians lead a life in which Prokofiev has pride of place. Quite a few, would be my guess, certainly in Moscow. Yet even they have to live a life charted by Stalin and shoved down their throats by his worshippers and heirs.
There was something eerily symbolic in those two men dying on the same day. Stalin won the battle for public adoration then, and he is still winning it 71 years later. But life everlasting has a different pecking order – and assigns different quarters to geniuses like Prokofiev and ghouls like Stalin.
Sergei Prokofiev, RIP.
I beg to disagree that Rach was a lesser composer. His second and third piano concertos stand unrivaled and unmatched until now. My subjective ranking of best Russian composers ever would run like that: 1. Rachmaninoff; 2. Stravinsky; 3. Prokofiev; 4. Scriabin; 5. Tchaikovsky; 6. Musorgsky; 7. Rimsky-Korsakov; 8. Shostakovich; 9. Borodin; 10. Glazunov
If music were a sporting contest, Prokofiev would still get the bronze medal in your standings, and I thank you on his behalf. Out of interest, are Rach 2 and 3 “unrivalled and unmatched” only in Russia or everywhere? If it’s the latter, then Messrs Beethoven and Brahms might have something to say about it.
I’ve also heard good reports of piano concertos by an Austrian bloke, named I think Wolfgang something-or-other.
As for Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, I think they’re among his weakest works. They contain some magnificent tunes, but he can’t think of anything to do with the tunes but repeat them. Give him a good tune by Corelli or Chopin or Paganini, and he surpasses even Brahms and Dohnányi in his ability to develop it, but his own tunes, wonderfully hummable though they are, seem to paralyse him. But the fourth piano concerto, despite its notorious faults, adumbrates what a truly great Rachmaninoff piano concerto might have been like, if the endless routine of concerts hadn’t left him so exhausted.
Alas, my beloved Alexander Tikhonovich Gretchaninov doesn’t make your top ten! He’ll just have to compete in Division Two, with Glinka, Cui, Accrington Stanley and similar no-hopers.
Forty-odd years ago, I was overwhelmed by Prokofiev’s opera The Fiery Angel. I haven’t heard it since: I haven’t dared to hear it since.
But you dismiss Rachmaninoff too easily. His symphonies, his one-act operas and above all his settings of the Liturgy and Vespers raise him (in my estimation) above all other Russian composers. And he wrote some piano pieces too!
As for Stalin, in the Kingdom of Heaven his name will scarcely be remembered, while Prokofiev will have all the honour he deserves. Isn’t eschatology fun?
I don’t really dismiss Rachmaninov at all. For one thing, all the pianists among my friends and wives (well, one wife actually) love playing his music because somehow their fingers go into all the right places all by themselves. One could tell the composer was a great pianist. And yes, the pieces you mention are fine — he was perhaps the only real Christian among his contemporary composers. For me, however, his music lacks somewhat in emotional subtlety and intellectual depth. Again, for me he isn’t as sublime as the three 20th century giants, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich (Gretchaninov obviously aside). One could even argue that Rachmaninov’s sensibilities were firmly lodged in the 19th century, not the 20th. Hence I’d compare him to Tchaikovsky, not to the there I mentioned — and I much prefer him to Tchaikovsky.
Oh yes, while we’re on the subject of Russian piano music, no conversation is ever complete without a mention of Mussorgsky’s Pictures, a true masterpiece. If you can get hold of the recent recording by my good friend Naum Grubert, you’re in for some unalloyed delight.
I agree that Rachmaninoff’s sensibilities are, if not 19th Century, certainly pre-Revolutionary. Even when his music acquires an American tinge, it’s reminiscent of MacDowell more than of Barber. But is that a bad thing?
I agree too that he’s deficient in intellect compared with Bach or Brahms, but so are Schubert and Chopin. If, at best, he’s no better than Schubert or Chopin, that’s still pretty good, isn’t it?
I know Pictures from an Exhibition only in Ravel’s orchestration, but I remember half-hearing the piano version on the radio long, long ago and being intrigued by it. Mr Grubert’s recording seems not to be available yet.
You can hear some of Gretchaninov’s profoundly Christian music on the Holst Singers’ album “Ikon”. I don’t think you’ll find it lacking in either emotion or intellect.