Volume 56, Number 13 · August 13, 2009
Bad Bargains for Russian Music
By Michael Kimmelman
The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years
by Simon Morrison
Oxford University Press, 491 pp., $29.95
The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays
by Richard Taruskin
University of California Press, 488 pp., $39.95
On Russian Music
by Richard Taruskin
University of California Press, 407 pp., $39.95
It is one of the abiding curiosities of modern music history that in 1936, at forty-four, after more than a decade of success in New York and Paris, Sergei Prokofiev took up permanent residence in Stalinist Moscow. For a while he enjoyed the privileges of official patronage, but, inevitably, the tide turned, and during the 1948 show trials, he was censured for formalist misdeeds along with Dmitri Shostakovich and others. Concert and theater managers withdrew his compositions from performances. Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky, with his music, survived, a score Prokofiev came to despise precisely because it alone of his works was allowed to be played, ad nauseam, on Soviet radio. Prokofiev spent years in this sort of internal exile, homebound, invalided by strokes, sometimes capable only of a single hour's work a day, and desperate to revise his ballets and operas to please the bureaucrats, many of them talentless competitors with no intention of rehabilitating him. Various of his last works speak to the effects of his self-censorship and opportunism.
Review, 3424 words
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