Biography: For many in the West, Prokofiev is the least "Russian" of Russian composers. His music contains no Dostoyevskian chaos; rather, a lean and joyful vitality. I first heard his orchestral fable, Peter and the Wolf, in the 1966 recording narrated by Sean Connery (of all people); its scintillating tunes still charm, writes Ian Thomson
Prokofiev's personality did not appear classically Russian, either. Impromptu time-keeping was anathema to him and he preferred to abstain from alcohol at gala receptions. Yet, in his zeal to serve his country, the composer was determinedly Russian. Prokofiev's patriotic cantata for Eisenstein's film, Alexander Nevksy, remains one of the best-loved of all Russian choral works.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Sergey Prokofiev's death; it is time to take stock of his achievement. Prokofiev wrote seven operas, seven symphonies, numerous oratorios, eight film scores, nine piano sonatas and seven ballets, as well as several divertimenti for children. Even if we include the hackwork he produced for Stalin, Prokofiev's music is now indisputably classic. This scholarly biography by David Nice covers the first 44 years of the composer's life up to 1935, when Stalin began to impose a brutal censorship on the arts. The second volume will document Prokofiev's survival of Stalin's Great Terror and the writing of such dark masterpieces as the Sixth Symphony.
Born in 1891 in the Ukraine, as a child Prokofiev lived a charmed life on a country estate. At an early age, his mother introduced him to La Traviata, and he was composing piano pieces while still in the nursery. (His earliest opera, The Giant, was composed at the age of nine.)
The prodigy's musical education continued at the St Petersburg Conservatory. There, the "capricious little monster- composer", writes Nice, was taught composition by Rimsky-Korsakov. Prokofiev proved a mercurial and brilliant student, and was often arrogant. One day he challenged the Cuban chess champion, José Capablanca, to a game of chess, and nearly beat him.
Prokofiev lived in London during the first World War, an émigré from the new socialist Russia. In 1919, at the conflict's end, he arrived in the US, where one observer thought he resembled "a cross between a Scandinavian minister and a soccer player". Though Prokofiev found the American music scene "backward", New York inspired his lovely Overture on Hebrew Themes, which fuses folk melody with strange, angular audacities.
From the start, Prokofiev's music had a forward-looking edge; according to Nice, the composer mocked fellow émigré musicians who wallowed nostalgically in old Petersburg's imperial style. Prokofiev's first masterpiece composed on western soil, the opera Love for Three Oranges (1919), combined avant-garde sonorities with a fairy-tale grotesquerie.
Prokofiev's first tour of the Soviet Union, in 1927, coincided with the première in Leningrad of Shostakovich's shimmering First Symphony, an astonishing achievement for the 19-year-old rival composer. In 1936, however, Pravda would denounce Shostakovich as an anti-Bolshevik "decadent"; and from then on, Prokofiev himself became increasingly aware of the darker side of Soviet life. The Pravda attack, ordered by Stalin, heralded a new age in Russia of agit-prop compositions and the trapdoor disappearance of writers and artists.
Still, Prokofiev remained impressed by Soviet patronage of the arts, and in later years he was encouraged to write monumental works for Stalin's mass audiences. One of these, his 1950 oratorio, On Guard for Peace, contains the children's sung refrain: "We don't want war." But, just two years earlier, Prokofiev's Spanish-born wife, Lina, had been sent to the gulag on trumped-up charges of spying. With her multinational ancestry (Lina had Huguenot and Catalan blood), she was the sort of cosmopolitan whom Stalin feared and waged his paranoid war against.
At the end of this volume, Prokofiev, his wife and family are about to leave Paris and settle in the Soviet Union. Once there, the composer would be forced to make huge and ever more damaging compromises with the Communist state, his life intextricably entwined with that of Stalin. (By an extraordinary coincidence, Prokofiev was to die exactly one hour before the dictator.)
In the 50 years since his death in 1953, Prokofiev has lost none of his power to unsettle and delight. David Nice, a London-based musicologist, is to be congratulated on this painstaking work, which brings the Russian composer's early career spendidly to life.
Ian Thomson's biography, Primo Levi, was recently published in Vintage paperback
Prokofiev: From Russia to the West 1891-1935. By David Nice, Yale, 390pp, £25