Serge Prokofiev
Serge Prokofiev was born in Sontzovka, Russia, on April 23, 1891. He was extraordinarily precocious in music. After receiving some training at the piano from his mother, he completed the writing of an opera by the time he was ten. Preliminary music study took place with Glière. In his thirteenth year he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and Liadov among others and from which he was graduated with the Rubinstein Prize for his first piano concerto. His advanced musical thinking was already evident in his first major work for orchestra, The Scythian Suite, introduced in St. Petersburg in 1916. He continued to develop his own personality, formulating his highly individual style and creative idiosyncrasies in works like the ballet Chout, the first violin concerto, and the Classical Symphony, all written during the era of World War I. In 1918 he toured the United States, making his American debut with a New York piano recital on November 20. While in the United States he was commissioned to write the opera The Love for Three Oranges for the Chicago Opera. From 1919 to 1933 Prokofiev made his home in Paris, but in 1933 he returned to his native land to stay there for the rest of his life. Though he was honored in the Soviet Union as one of its great creative figures—and was the recipient of the Stalin Prize for his monumental Seventh Piano Sonata inspired by World War II—he did not escape censure in 1948 when the Central Committee of the Communist Party denounced Soviet composers for their partiality towards experimentation, modernism and cerebralism, in their musical works. Nevertheless, Prokofiev soon recovered his high estate in Soviet music; in 1951 he received the Stalin Prize again, this time for his oratorio On Guard for Peace and the symphonic suite, Winter Bonfire. His sixtieth birthday, that year, was celebrated throughout the country with concerts and broadcasts. Prokofiev died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Moscow on March 5, 1953.
Prokofiev was one of the giants of 20th-century music. His seven symphonies, five piano concertos, nine piano sonatas, the opera War and Peace, ballets, chamber music, piano compositions and various shorter orchestral works are among the most significant contributions made in our time to music. The highly personal way of writing melodies, his unusual progressions, his harmonic vocabulary are all present in the few lighter and simpler works with which he made a significant contribution to the contemporary repertory of semi-classics.
The March so familiar to radio listeners throughout the United States as the theme music for the program “The F.B.I. in Peace and War” comes from the opera The Love for Three Oranges (1921). The libretto by the composer based on a tale of Carlo Gozzi is a charming fantasy in which a prince saves himself from death through gloom by means of laughter, and who then goes at once to rescue a princess from her prison in an orange. The march occurs in the second act where an effort is being made to get the Prince to laugh, for which purpose a festival is being arranged. The march music is played as the court jester drags the reluctant Prince to these festivities. The quixotic skips in the melody, the grotesquerie of the musical style, and the pert discords are all typical of Prokofiev’s creative manner.
Peter and the Wolf, a “symphonic fairy tale” for narrator and orchestra op. 67 (1936) was intended by the composer to teach children the instruments of the orchestra. But the music is so consistently delightful for its sprightly lyricism and wit that it has proved a favorite at symphony and semi-classical concerts. The story here being told is about a lad named Peter who turns a deaf ear to his grandfather’s warning and goes out into the meadow. There a wolf has frightened, in turn, a cat, bird, and duck. But Peter is not afraid of him. He captures the wolf, ties him up with a rope and takes him to the zoo.
The composition opens with the following explanation by the narrator: “Each character in the tale is represented by a different instrument in the orchestra: the bird by a flute; the duck by an oboe; the cat by a clarinet in the low register; grandpapa by the bassoon; the wolf by three French horns; Peter by the string quartet; and the hunter’s rifle shots by the kettledrums and bass drums.” Then, as the story of Peter and the wolf unfolds, little melodies appear and reappear, each identifying some character in the story. Peter’s theme is a lyrical folk song with a puckish personality for strings. Vivid and realistic little tunes represent the cat, bird, and duck, each tune providing an amusing insight into the personality of each of these animals.
Summer Day, opp. 65a and 65b (1935) is another of the composer’s compositions for children which makes for delightful listening. It started out as a suite of twelve easy piano pieces for children called Music for Children. Later on the composer orchestrated seven of these sections and called the new work Summer Day. In the first movement, “Morning,” a whimsical little tune is heard in first flute against a contrapuntal background by other woodwinds, strings, and bass drum. Midway a secondary melody is given by bassoons, horns and cellos. “Tag,” the familiar child’s game, is represented in a tripping melody for violins and flutes; the music grows increasingly rhythmic in the intermediary section. In the “Waltz,” a saucy waltz tune with an unusual syncopated construction is presented by the violins, interrupted by exclamations from the woodwind with typical Prokofiev octave leaps. “Regrets” opens with a tender melody for cellos, but is soon taken over by oboes, and then the violins. This melody is then varied by violins and clarinets. “March” offers the main march melody in clarinets and oboes. “Evening” highlights a gentle song by solo flute, soon joined by the clarinet. As the violins take over the melody the pensive mood is maintained. The concluding movement, “Moonlit Meadows” is dominated by a melody for solo flute.