Serge Prokofieff and his orchestral music — A Reader’s Guide

dullness of sitting and drumming one thing over and over,” Prokofieff wrote, “mother hurried to keep me supplied with new pieces so that the amount of music I studied was enormous.”

This exposure to music continued when the family moved to Moscow. There Prokofieff attended the opera repeatedly and soon developed a taste for composing for voice himself. One of these early efforts was submitted to the composer Taneieff, who advised the family to send their son to Reinhold Gliere for further study. This early attraction for the theatre was later to culminate not only in several operas of marked originality but in numerous scores for ballet and the screen. To the end Prokofieff never quite lost his childhood passion for the stage. One has only to hear his music for the “Romeo and Juliet” ballet and the opera, “The Love of Three Oranges” to realize how enduring a hold the theatre had on him.

Emboldened by Taneieff’s reaction, the eleven-year-old boy next showed him a symphony. Prokofieff himself told the story to Olin Downes, who interviewed him in New York in 1919 for the “Boston Post.” Taneieff leafed through the manuscript and said:—“Pretty well, my boy. You are mastering the form rapidly. Of course, you have to develop more interesting harmony. Most of this is tonic, dominant and subdominant [the simplest and most elementary chords in music], but that will come.”

“This,” said Prokofieff to Mr. Downes, “distressed me greatly. I did not wish to do only what others had done. I could not endure the thought of producing only what others had produced. And so I started out, very earnestly, not to imitate, but to find a way of my own. It was very hard, and my courage was severely put to the test in the following years, since I destroyed reams of music, most of which sounded very well, whenever I realized that it was only an echo of some one’s else. This often wounded me deeply.

“Eleven years later I brought a new score to Taneieff, whom I had not been working with for some seasons. You should have seen his face when he looked at the music. ‘But, my dear boy, this is terrible. What do you call this? And why that?’ And so forth. Then I said to him, ‘Master, please remember what you said to me when I brought my G-major symphony. It was only tonic, dominant and subdominant.’

“‘God in heaven,’ he shouted, ‘am I responsible for this?’”

Prokofieff was scarcely thirteen when another distinguished Russian composer entered his life—and again by way of an opera score. Alexander Glazounoff was so impressed by a work entitled “Feast During the Plague” that the boy was promptly enrolled at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. That was in 1904. There he remained for ten years, among his teachers being Liadoff, Tcherepnin, and Rimsky-Korsakoff. From them he absorbed much of the prodigious skill as colorist and orchestrator that later went into his compositions, besides a thorough schooling in the nationalist ideals of Russian music.

At the same time he was already feeling the urge to express himself in a bolder and more unorthodox style of writing. This rebelliousness was later to lead to controversial clashes over several of his scores. By the time he left the Conservatory in 1914, Glazounoff knew that Prokofieff had wandered off into paths of his own. Yet he arranged for a trial performance of Prokofieff’s First Symphony. This proved crucial, for it attracted the notice of an influential group of vanguard musicians and, perhaps even more important, a publisher. Yet, when he graduated, it was not as composer but as pianist, that Prokofieff carried off first prize. Shortly after his graduation, Prokofieff’s father died, and when the First World War broke out later that summer, he was granted exemption from military service because of his widowed mother.

During the war years Prokofieff composed two works that would appear to be at opposite extremes of orchestral style—the “Classical Symphony” and the “Scythian Suite”. One is an unequivocal declaration of faith in the balanced serenity and suavity of the Mozartean tradition, and the other rocks with an almost savage upheaval of barbaric power. Over both, however, hovers the iron control and superb sureness of idiom of a searching intellect and an unfailing artistic insight. The two works represent two parts rather than two sides of a richly integrated personality.