Prokofiev: Sublime and Bathetic

Call me over-cute, but Prokofiev & Shostakovich sometimes seem to me to be the 20^th century equivalent of Mozart and Beethoven: the older composer possessed of a tremendous facility, yet hard to pin down in mood and character, admired but not always respected by the younger, more passionate composer.

Prokofiev was the Stravinsky who never left Russia, or rather the Stravinsky who left an “ enfant terrible” and came back a sage.

Of course the reality was much more complex. Yes, Prokofiev loved the bizarre and dissonant, but he had a great gift for melody and could write easily and idiomatically in any style. He had a neo-classical phase early on (the 1^st “Classical” symphony and the 1^st piano concerto), where he mimicked earlier models (Haydn and Tchakovsky respectively) while simultaneously and riotously sending them up. When he was churning out his brazenly dissonant ballets for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, he could still write the sweetly eloquent Violin Concerto no 1. But for a time, it seemed he would be known as a composer of jagged little pills like The Fiery Angel and The Love for Three Oranges.

When he returned to the USSR  in the Thirties (he had gone into exile at the time of the Revolution) , he returned from a sense of loneliness, from a need to reconnect with the freezing plains of his Fatherland and set about writing music “for the people”.

For his pains, he was chastised by Stalin and his cultural stooges almost immediately; they attacked him, Shostakovich, Khatchaturian and others for writing “formalist” music: he had not only to renounce his earlier dissonance, but also to buckle down and write hymns to the comrades. Somehow, his music never quite recovered from the blow: Shostakovich, who had, if possible, endured worse epithets than his, was able to continue difficult and challenging music with a tongue-in-cheek nod to the “masses”, but Prokofiev’s facility was, for once, defeated by his ideological confusion.

He continued to write copiously in all forms, his ballets (Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, The Stone Flower), operas (War and Peace), symphonies (nos 5-7) and concertos (violin concerto no2, symphony concerto for cello) being accepted and loved by audiences worldwide. But the impish mischievousness of some of his earlier works was gone, the language sometimes pallid and strait-laced.  Of course, at the best of times, he was still able to spice up the conventional Tchaikovskian soundworld with bizarre harmonies and rhythms.

Listening to these, I kind of think that Prokofiev did win in the end, in the sense that he continued to write music that was hard to characterise: just as in his youth, he would write wicked tunes with a touch of the sublime, so in his last years, he would write sublime tunes with a touch of the wicked!