Prokofiev biog — Sergei Prokofiev | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

I can never understand why Prokofiev went back to live in Russia in 1936.

It didn’t happen just like that. Although he had only rarely revisited the Soviet Union in the first fourteen years after he had left it, from 1932 onwards he had been making regular and encouraging concert tours there. And he had already accepted Soviet citizenship. So it happened as a gradual and as, far as he could see in his political innocence, natural process. As a Russian exile in the West he was overshadowed by Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Back in the USSR, he thought, there would be no one big enough to overshadow him. He was reckoning without Shostakovich, however. Politically, it was a big mistake but, after eighteen years in the West, he badly needed to get back in touch with his Russian roots.

So why did he leave in the first place?

Though comparatively sudden, his departure from Russia for the West in 1918 - taking him first to America for a couple of years but then, on a more or less permanent basis, to Paris - was actually quite logical. By Russian standards he had always been a rebel, irritating distinguished teachers like Lyadov and Glazunov at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. The Rubinstein piano prize he won as much through cheek as through genius by intimidating the judges with the sensational virtuosity of his own First Piano Concerto. The Second Piano Concerto and the Scythian Suite proved to be even more terrifying to Russian audiences.

They liked his Classical Symphony though, didn’t they?

Yes, but he couldn’t keep on writing period pieces like that and, anyway, in the new Soviet state musical life was in disarray. In the West, on the other hand, he could hope for support from the all-powerful Sergei Diaghilev, who duly commissioned his Buffoon, Pas d’acier and Prodigal Son for the Ballets Russes in Paris. He was able to secure a production of his opera The Love for Three Oranges in Chicago and he was in such demand as a pianist that he was moved to write the brilliant Third Piano Concerto and the scarcely less attractive Fifth to add to his concert repertoire.

So it must have been good publicity for the USSR when he went back.

Yes, and he no doubt thought the authorities would treat him gently because of that. Besides, even before he returned to Russia, his music was becoming more accessible in style and his gift for melody more and more apparent, as his film score for Lieutenant Kijé clearly confirmed. But, in fact, neither this development nor an extensive series of frankly conformist cantatas and nationalist choral works - nor even the award of a Stalin Prize - was enough to preserve him from severe criticism from the Union of Soviet Composers and its Communist Party masters. Official opposition to his operas, War and Peace above all, was particularly distressing for him.

So how did he survive it?

The positive aspect of Prokofiev’s boundless egotism - painfully demonstrated by the abandonment of his politically suspect Spanish-born wife Lina Llubera for the politically influential Mira Mendelson - was his unshakable self-confidence and indefatigable creative energy.Romeo and Juliet, the greatest of all modern full-length ballet scores, Peter and the Wolf, one of the most popular of all children’s entertainments, the Alexander Nevsky film score, a classic of its kind, the last three symphonies, the last four piano sonatas - to mention only some of the most successful- were all products of Prokofiev’s Soviet period. In spite of the ill health he experienced in the last thirteen years of his life, he kept on composing almost to the end.

What would he have considered his greatest failure?

Failing to outlive Joseph Stalin: he couldn’t have known it but they died on the same day.