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Celebration of a 'Decadent Formalist'
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19173 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1991 |
1,915 Words |
| Author
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Theodore W. Libbey, Jr.
Theodore W. Libbey, Jr., formerly the senior editor of Musical
America, contributes regularly to national publications and is
currently at work on a selective guide to classical music on
compact discs. |
"When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes." With deep foreboding Calpurnia thus warns her husband in the second act of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, as the fateful Ides of March approach.
So it must also have seemed in Moscow on March 5, 1953, when switchboards lit up and ministry offices blazed through the night in reaction to the death of Josef Stalin. By a remarkable coincidence, that same day also saw the death of Sergei Sergeivich Prokofiev, the last great composer to grow up in Czarist Russia, and one of the first musicians to leave the Soviet Union after the Revolution.
The irony of the occasion would not have been lost on Prokofiev, who had learned, during the last seventeen years of his life, along with innumerable others, what it meant to be a victim of Stalin's reign of terror. Following his voluntary return to the Soviet Union in 1936, he witnessed first-hand the process Juri Jelagin would later describe as "the taming of the muse." He found himself gradually being sucked into the politics of censorship, repeatedly having to struggle against the ideological quicksand of art-for-the-state, shamefully suffering the rebukes of his inferiors, and, eventually, wasting away in a joyless battle for survival against enforced privation and his own failing health. He had come home only to be, in effect, brutally mugged, bound, and gagged by the apparatchiks and left for dead.
Through most of this ordeal his mind remained sharp, and his music continued to display great power and originality. But with the Communist Party decree of February 10, 1948, which branded Prokofiev and other prominent Soviet composers of the day "decadent formalists" and banned much of their music, his spirit began to break. Some have seen a falling off in the quality of his writing from this point. While the steepness of that decline can be debated, it is clear that only a few important compositions issued from Prokofiev's pen during the final five years of his life. Most of his output was "celebratory" music written on commission, undertaken to keep from starving. For to the end, Prokofiev refused to ask those who had condemned him for a handout. So who was the beggar, and who the prince? The world has known for some time.
Because this year marks the hundredth anniversary of Prokofiev's birth, his music is being performed even more widely than it normally is, which, for a twentieth-century composer, is very widely indeed. The composer's actual birthday on April 23 (coincidentally, the date
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