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frontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page i SERGEY PROKOFIEVAND HIS WORLD frontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page ii OTHER PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS VOLUMES PUBLISHED IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL Brahms and His World edited by Walter Frisch (1990) Mendelssohn and His World edited by R. Larry Todd (1991) Richard Strauss and His World edited by Bryan Gilliam (1992) Dvoˇrák and His World edited by Michael Beckerman (1993) Schumann and His World edited by R. Larry Todd (1994) Bartók and His World edited by Peter Laki (1995) Charles Ives and His World edited by J. Peter Burkholder (1996) Haydn and His World edited by Elaine R. Sisman (1997) Tchaikovsky and His World edited by Leslie Kearney (1998) Schoenberg and His World edited by Walter Frisch (1999) Beethoven and His World edited by Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (2000) Debussy and His World edited by Jane F. Fulcher (2001) Mahler and His World edited by Karen Painter (2002) Janáˇcek and His World edited by Michael Beckerman (2003) Shostakovich and His World edited by Laurel E. Fay (2004) Aaron Copland and His World edited by Carol J.Oja and Judith Tick (2005) Franz Liszt and His World edited by Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley (2006) Edward Elgar and His World edited by Byron Adams (2007) frontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page iii SERGEY PROKOFIEV AND HIS WORLD EDITED BY SIMON MORRISON PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD frontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page iv Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved For permissions information, see page 562 Library of Congress Control Number 2008926970 ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13894-7 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13895-4 (paperback) British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This publication has been produced by the Bard College Publications Office: Ginger Shore, Director Kevin Trabucco, Cover design Natalie Kelly, Design Text edited by Paul De Angelis and Erin Clermont Music typeset by Don Giller This publication has been underwritten in part by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 frontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page v Contents Preface and Acknowledgments viii SIMON MORRISON Note on Transliteration, Dates, and Titles xii PART I DOCUMENTS “Look After Your Son’s Talents”: 2 The Literary Notebook of Mariya Prokofieva INTRODUCTORYESSAY, COMMENTARY, ANDTRANSLATIONBYPAMELADAVIDSON The Krzhizhanovsky-Prokofiev Collaboration on Eugene Onegin, 60 1936 (A Lesser-Known Casualty of the Pushkin Death Jubilee) INTRODUCTORYESSAY, COMMENTARY, ANDTRANSLATIONBYCARYLEMERSON Prokofiev and Atovmyan: Correspondence, 1933–1952 190 INTRODUCTIONANDCOMMENTARYBYNELLYKRAVETZ TRANSLATIONBYSIMONMORRISON Prokofiev’s Immortalization 285 LEONIDMAXIMENKOV PART II ESSAYS “I Came Too Soon”: Prokofiev’s Early Career in America 334 STEPHEND. PRESS Lieutenant Kizhe:New Media, New Means 376 KEVINBARTIG Observations on Prokofiev’s Sketchbooks 401 MARKARANOVSKY TRANSLATIONBYJASONSTRUDLER Prokofiev on the Los Angeles Limited 423 ELIZABETHBERGMAN Between Two Aesthetics: The Revision of Pilnyak’s Mahogany 452 and Prokofiev’s Fourth Symphony MARINAFROLOVA-WALKER • v • frontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page vi CONTENTS After Prokofiev 493 PETERJ. SCHMELZ Beyond Death and Evil:Prokofiev’s Spirituality and Christian Science 530 LEON BOTSTEIN Permissions and Credits 562 Index 563 Notes on the Contributors 578 • vi • frontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page vii For Malcolm Brown frontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page viii Preface and Acknowledgments Sergey Prokofiev composed some of the most beloved works in the Western musical canon. Romeo and Juliet, the Third Piano Concerto, and Peter and the Wolfendure in the orchestral and theatrical repertoire even as that repertoire shrinks, ceding to the popular idioms from which it sprang. Much of Prokofiev’s appeal stems from his remarkable talent as a melodicist and his invigoration of traditional genres and forms. We know this composer, yet there is much about his art, and his life, that remains unknown. The story of Prokofiev’s prodigious childhood in tsarist Russia, his mat- uration in the West, and his rise and fall as a Stalinist-era composer has been greatly illuminated by the Serge Prokofiev Foundation in London which, since 2001, has published a biannual journal, Three Oranges, devot- ed to his career. In 2001, 2004, and 2007, respectively, the Glinka Museum in Moscow published a collection of documents dealing with Prokofiev’s Soviet period, and in 2003, David Nice produced a detailed biography of the first half of his career. Crucial questions are unanswered, however, and long-standing debates unresolved. The greatest puzzle concerns Prokofiev’s decision to relocate with his family from Paris to Moscow in 1936: the chain of events leading up to that move, and the pressures exerted on the composer by Stalinist cultural and political agencies to undertake it, continue to be matters of informed and uninformed speculation. The precise nature of his existence in the Soviet Union—the chronology of his wartime evacu- ation, the bureaucratic discussions that resulted in certain works being celebrated (Alexander Nevsky, the Fifth Symphony, the First Violin Sonata) and others prohibited (the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October, Tonya, A Story of A Real Man), the causes of the precipitous decline in his health after 1945, his reactions to the arrest of his longtime collaborator Vsevolod Meyerhold—likewise remains unclear. And whereas the publication in 2003 of Prokofiev’s diaries (in Russian) offers fascinating, provocative insight into his career between 1907 and 1933, the chronology of his final creative years in the West is incomplete. Prokofiev spent much of his composing career in and around Paris and Moscow, but he left traces of his existence as a performer in Buffalo, Casablanca, Denver, Havana, Lisbon, London, Montreal, St. Petersburg/ • viii • frontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page ix Simon Morrison Leningrad, Tokyo, and dozens of other cities and towns. Letters, manu- scripts, and reminiscences are preserved in national archives, municipal libraries, small-town colleges (Dartmouth and Wheaton), specialized col- lections (the Mary Baker Eddy Library), and the scrapbooks of friends and acquaintances. Some of the Prokofiev holdings in Russia are inaccessible, and others simply unexplored—a consequence of the Soviet practice of distributing the records of leading cultural and political figures among dif- ferent federal archives. Rarely do revelations about canonic artists materialize, but Prokofiev remains fertile ground for scholarly study. This collection of documents and essays, the companion to the 2008 Bard Music Festival, probes beneath the surface of Prokofiev’s career, con- textualizing his contributions to music on both sides of the nascent Cold War divide. It contains hitherto unknown documents from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Serge Prokofiev Archive in London, and several smaller holdings in the United States. Pamela Davidson opens the documents section of this vol- ume with a translation of a literary notebook belonging to Prokofiev’s mother, Mariya Grigoryevna, which attests to her profound and long-lasting investment in her son’s education, especially as it concerned his indoctrina- tion in Schopenhauer and Russian Symbolist poetry. As Davidson explains in her introductory essay, the notebook is especially valuable for its insights into the conception of Prokofiev’s Seven, They Are Seven, an outlandish musical treatment of an ancient (third-century) Akkadian incantation against malevolent spirits. The little-performed score, which calls for full-sized orchestra, chorus, and dramatic tenor, sets a Russian translation of the incantation by Konstantin Balmont, a founding member of the Symbolist movement whose influence on composers greatly exceeded that of his peers. The second cluster of documents chronicles Prokofiev’s interaction with Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950), a dramatist and surrealist fiction writer rediscovered in Russia in the 1990s and only now becoming appreciated in English translation. Krzhizhanovsky fell out of favor with Stalinist cultural officials and, by inevitable extension, disappeared from Soviet-era accounts of Prokofiev’s career. Using exclusive archival materials, Caryl Emerson narrates the conception and reception of Krzhizhanovsky’s ill-starred theatrical adaptation of Pushkin’s novel-in- verse Eugene Onegin, a commission by the Moscow Chamber Theater for which Prokofiev composed incidental music in 1936. The adaptation went unperformed, leaving the composer free to later reuse parts of his score. Reactionary politics doomed numerous Pushkin-related commis- sions in the run-up to the official commemoration of the centennial • ix •