Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography, by Harlow Robinson

I’m always happy to read books recommended by friends. This is a book written by a friend. My husband and I were introduced to Harlow and his husband a few weeks ago. Jim and I were happy to meet another couple as interested in literature, music, theater, and opera as we are. It feels like the beginning of a great friendship.

Harlow’s academic specialty is Slavic languages, Russian history, and literature. He was on the faculty of SUNY in Albany and Northeastern in Boston. He’s also an expert in music. He has presented pre-concert lectures, and has recorded opera talks for the Met. His expertise matched well with some of my reading over the last year: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, and a biography of Tchaikovsky.

Harlow’s biography of Prokofiev is an impressive piece of scholarship, its 500 pages filled with details, giving an almost month-by-month account of Prokofiev’s life. Harlow did his research during the 1970s and 1980s, including reading in the Soviet Central State Archive in Moscow and interviewing persons related to Prokofiev’s life including Prokofiev’s widow (his first wife, Lina, who died in London in 1989). Other sources include diaries, numerous correspondence, and a memoir that Prokofiev worked on late in life. Harlow’s biography was published in 1987. I read a reissue including a new foreword and afterword from 2002.

In addition to giving the reader the composer’s dramatic life story, I appreciated Harlow’s insightful musical analysis of Prokofiev’s many compositions, both minor works such as small piano pieces and songs, as well the famous works. He also introduced me to several more obscure works that I was unfamiliar with. Even Prokofiev’s well-known works benefit from Harlow’s careful study, placing them in context, recounting their composition history, and identifying influences and so on.

Prokofiev was born in 1891, two year’s before Tchaikovsky’s death. He was raised on a farm in the Ukraine that his father managed for its absentee owner, so Prokofiev’s childhood milieu was rural and working-class, but his personal upbringing was middle-class. His musical talent was identified early and his parents went to significant sacrifice to encourage Prokofiev’s gift and his initial career.

He first visited St. Petersburg at age 10 (his mother had relatives in the city) where he was introduced to music teachers. The family arranged for a mentor to work with him at home in the Ukraine. In 1904, age 13, Prokofiev and his mother moved to St. Petersburg and he enrolled in the conservatory, spending summers in the Ukraine where his father continued to live and work to support the family.

Younger than most of the other students and arrogant as you might expect from a precocious, pampered, only child, Prokofiev did not make friends easily. Throughout his life Prokofiev would be regarded as stiff and anti-social.

Prokofiev completed his undergraduate work at the Conservatory in 1909 but stayed on to do graduate work until 1914. In St. Petersburg he also made connections with the musical world beyond the Conservatory. Especially important were the private concerts called “Evenings of Contemporary Music” presented by the editors of the World of Art magazine, which brought Prokofiev into the circle of Diaghilev. The Evenings of Contemporary Music encouraged Prokofiev’s more individual and aggressive style and provided a helpful balance to the more traditional aesthetic favored by the Conservatory.

While he finished school and up until the revolutionary year of 1917, Prokofiev traveled in Europe. He saw the Ballet Russes in Paris. He met Diaghelev. He wrote his first and second piano concertos, the Classical Symphony, the ballets Ala and Lolly (which provides the music for The Scythian Suite) and he wrote his first mature opera, The Gambler, based on a novella of Dostoevsky. Prokofiev spent the month of the October Revolution composing at a resort town in the Caucusus.

Prokofiev’s life divides neatly into three acts, and Harlow divides his biography into the same three sections. The October Revolution closes the first act. Prokofiev has finished childhood and established himself as a significant composer with a promising future. Wishing to return to Paris but blocked now from traveling through Europe by the First World War, Prokofiev instead went the other way: east by train across Siberia, by boat across the Pacific, stopping in Japan and Honolulu before arriving in San Francisco, and then continuing by train again across the U.S.

Act two introduces the Spanish singer Carolina Codina (called “Lina”), who will become Prokofiev’s wife and the mother of his two sons. He meets her in New York. During this first visit to the U.S. Prokofiev is also commissioned by the Chicago Opera to write The Love of Three Oranges, which will have its premiere in Chicago two years later, in 1921.

The rest of Prokofiev’s second act takes place mostly in Paris where Prokofiev rented several apartments over the next 20 years as well as summer homes elsewhere in France and Germany. Prokofiev continued his association with Diaghelev and the Ballet Russes. He also met the extended circle of composers then working in Paris. With Stravinsky he developed a professional rivalry. The two composers alternately praised and criticized each other (in public and in private) but certainly Prokofiev suffered the most from being compared to the ten-year older Stravinsky who had already claimed the “Russian” composer mantle and who was more at ease in Paris society and the high-modernist aesthetic they enjoyed. Prokofiev toured extensively playing his own works for piano, which was his primary source of income for many years, and occasionally conducting. During trips to the United States he made at least two visits to Los Angeles. Harlow identified the downtown hotel he stayed in during his first visit, the Clark Hotel, which is three blocks from my apartment. During his final visit in 1938 he met Walt Disney and other movie people. A studio offered him a contract to write film scores. He turned it down.

Act two of the Prokofiev life opera ends with his decision to leave Paris and return to Soviet Russia. Harlow does an excellent job of explaining this seemingly inexplicable decision. In Europe, although certainly recognized as among the highest tier of composers, Prokofiev failed to draw the acclaim, popularity, or commissions he felt he deserved. His music clung to a chromatic-inflected diatonicism which labeled him old-fashioned against the atonality being adopted by Schoenberg and his followers. Audiences wanted more of the “bad boy” he had been as a young composer. Meanwhile, as Soviet Russia grew increasingly isolated from musical advances in the west, Prokofiev was seen as a shining star, and his developing “new simplicity” style of music was better appreciated. Prokofiev’s ego was bruised in Europe and stroked in Russia. He felt small in the big pond of Europe and craved the better fit for the size of his talent in Russia. Add this to a natural nostalgia for his home country, language, and culture, and the pull to return seems understandable.

He began occasional trips back to Russia in 1933. Over the next five years his trips to Russia became increasingly frequent and extensive. For Russian audiences he wrote music for the film, Lieutenant Kizhe, the ballet Romeo and Juliet, and the narrated story for children, Peter and the Wolf. Despite being aware that Shostokovich’s opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk had been denounced by the Soviets in 1936 (after having already received nearly 200 performances since its premiere in 1934), Prokofiev moved permanently to Russia in 1938. Harlow writes (p. 276):

“In Paris, Prokofiev had been only one of many talented composers competing for the attention of a sophisticated and satiated public; in Moscow, at least in 1933, he stood head and shoulders above the rest. His artistic influence and stature were much greater in the U.S.S.R. than in France. No doubt his special position in the Soviet musical world compensated to a large extent for the bureaucratic, political and material difficulties he encountered in Russia. Then, too, he was insulated from many of the frustrations of Soviet daily life, since he was living in the best hotels in Moscow and Leningrad.”

Act three in Russia brings a mix of hard-won success followed by hard-fought failure for Prokofiev amid the stifling and chaotic culture of Soviet bureaucracy. Some of his late-stage works were wildly well-received while others were officially shunned and canceled, not always in any relation, either one way or the other, to the artistic quality of the works. He receives prizes for some works: his Fifth Symphony, his score for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part I (among others). Other works fail to be produced. The first part of his two-part opera for War and Peace is well-received, the second part, prepared for the following year, is canceled. With several late career projects he attempted to appease the Soviet cultural bureaucracy by choosing material and tailoring the composition to their standards (nationalistic, heroic, folk-infused) but the bureaucratic whims were so ill-defined and politically-motivated that Prokofiev lost his way, neither satisfying the bureaucrats nor creating quality work. Once the tide turned against him entirely, in 1948, he was no longer able to navigate against it.

During World War II he was evacuated several times to safe locations with other artists. He continued to compose, tirelessly, obsessively, despite the obstacles. His marriage, which had always been fractious fell apart. He left his wife Lina and their two sons and began a relationship with a woman 24 years his younger named Mina. He married Mina, eventually, in 1948. Shortly after that, his first wife, Lina, no longer under the protection of her marriage to Prokofiev was arrested on charges of espionage and sent to a prison camp, her only real offense being a foreigner who had made known her wish to leave Russia.

Prokofiev suffered a concussion in 1945 and a related diagnosis of hyper-tension leading to medical advice of rest and limited composition, which Prokofiev mostly worked around. He lived his last years in Moscow, and outside the city at an artists’ retreat.

Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953, the same day as Stalin. Lina was released from prison shortly after.

Harlow’s book does a great job of balancing the very high academic standards of his research with a quite readable account of Prokofiev’s dramatic life-story. Both the personal history and the musicological analysis are extremely well done, and I found it all enjoyable. My husband, too, was interested in my reading and would ask for updates on what Prokofiev was “doing now” and then illustrate the musical examples with recordings from his CD collection. I had fun reading and learned a lot, which is a nice way to spend a week or so with a book, and what anyone could hope from a friendship with an author as well.