ABSTRACT
The music of Serge Prokofiev is probably the greatest single influence in Soviet music. Prokofiev belongs to the middle generation, standing between the composers who, like Glière and Vassilenko, were well known before the Revolution, and composers like Shostakovich, whose formative years were spent under the Soviet Regime. While preRevolutionary composers had to be “naturalized” as Soviet musicians, Prokofiev’s music fitted without strain into the scheme of “socialist realism,” as the Soviet catchword describes the essence of Soviet music. The evolutionary catalogue of Prokofiev’s works shows an extraordinary constancy of purpose. There are no sudden changes of style, no incursions into self-denying classicism or sweeping modernism. There are no recantations, no “returns to Bach.” Instead, there is a creative self-assertion. In the early years of the Soviet Republic, musicians were apt to speculate on whether this or that composer was “consonant” with the spirit of the new nation born of revolution. Of contemporary composers, there were few who were as close in spirit to the new music of the masses as Prokofiev’s cheerfully lyrical muse. Yet Prokofiev was a Westerner. He went eastward around the world in 1918, and he did not revisit Russia until 1927. As a concert pianist and conductor of his own works, he was a familiar figure in Paris, Berlin, London, and New York. Diaghilev, acting entirely outside of Russia, has produced the majority of Prokofiev’s ballets. Prokofiev’s first Soviet composition, Le Pas d’Acier, was largely a Westerner’s conception of the march of industrial life in Soviet Russia. It was “pro-Soviet” music, if music can be pro or con, but it touched only on the external life of the Soviet Union. But in the same year when Le Pas d’Acier was produced by Diaghilev in Paris, Prokofiev went to Russia on a concert tour. The reception accorded to him was unmistakable: Prokofiev was accepted as a truly Soviet composer, even though working in France. In 1934, Prokofiev settled permanently in Moscow, without abandoning his annual visits to Europe and America.
