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PROKOFIEV by Israel V. Nestyev. (Stanford University Press. London: Oxford University Press.)

MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. (Faber.)

Prokofiev’s is a classic case for the Communist critic. He left Russia in 1918, but finding in the Western world (so the story runs) only pessimistic philosophies, esoteric new music, erratic and philistine patrons, he went back in 1933 to his native land to gain freedom in composing for a large public and in a just society, which by encouraging his lyricism and chiding his satire and cacophony enabled him truly to fulfil himself. There is an equally melodramatic argument for the simpleminded critic on this side of the curtain — that after his return Prokofiev ran inevitably into trouble with the Party line on art, and that in satisfying Zhdanov’s dictates his genius petered out in hack-work and kitsch. In spite of the staleness of these rival concepts Prokofiev’s life and music does seem to offer great interest in the very realms in which they attempt to legislate — on the questions of exile, audience, patronage, tonality — though our conclusions ought to try to be the reverse of dogmatic and complacent.

     Nestyev is a Soviet musicologist and his enormous book is a revised version of an earlier and less bulky study. As for the critical episode of the return of the prodigal, his narrative clearly shows that Prokofiev was never unsympathetic to the ideology of the Revolution, that he never lost musical contact with Russia between 1918 and 1933 and that that period was for him marked by a lack of creative confidence. But we are given no substantial contemporary evidence of the composer s motives and Nestyev’s own commentary is written entirely from the idiot standpoint of Soviet orthodoxy. Nothing here, in fine, factually challenges the unsympathetic gloss put on the action by Stravinsky in this new instalment of Craft’s questions and his answers — that Prokofiev was ‘politically naïve’, that his music at the beginning of the thirties had far more success in Russia than in Europe and the United States, and that his return was ‘a sacrifice to the bitch goddess, and nothing else’.

     In his other remarks in the few pages in this volume about Prokofiev, Stravinsky tries hard not to be patronizing, but it is plain that he regards as somewhat ludicrous Prokofiev’s lack of intellect and culture, and as insignificant his development from an enfant only less terrible than Stravinsky himself to a prolific and popular composer who had grown up artistically at the same time as atonality and had bypassed it completely. From these pages we receive the impression of a musician like Elgar — the composer by instinct, well away from the main stream, interested off duty only in what won the three o’clock at Worcester. Stravinsky points his case by recalling that Diaghilev had at first thought that Prokofiev would develop into a great composer and clung to the view for several years before characterizing him as ‘stupid’. This line of thought leads to the view of Stravinsky and Prokofiev as polar opposites (if such a view can comprise the pair at all) — townee and peasant, cosmopolitan and nationalist, highbrow and middlebrow, first-rate and second-rate, etc.

     The falsity of these not uncommonly adumbrated antitheses is at once seen if we think of the likenesses between the two composers which no doubt arise from their common nationality, the similar time span of their careers, their association with the ballet, their conviction of the pre-eminence of the melodic element in music, and their development towards Italianate opera. It must sometimes strike us that if Prokofiev could never have been a Stravinsky, Stravinsky might conceivably have been a Prokofiev. The one acts as a yardstick for the other. Thinking of them in this way, Stravinsky’s intellectual brilliance seems a mere excrescence — as though his real musical achievement resided in some felt melodies and novel rhythms quite divorced from their sophisticated settings. In that case the taste and smartness of Stravinsky cease to be important and the index of his genius appears to be the frequent thwarting and strangulation of melody in his work (for example, what Eric Walter White characterizes as the ‘Elgarian’ theme in the last movement of the Piano Concerto).

     Speaking humorously (in the previous volume of conversations with Robert Craft) of the choice we all have to make between Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, Stravinsky pronounced himself a Dostoevskyan, but for all his indubitable knowingness about this (knowing it to be fashionable to be a Dostoevskyan and being that in spite of it), it was his fate to leave Prokofiev to compose an opera on War and Peace and to have to content himself with The Rake’s Progress — which for all its genius suffers from being a pastiche about puppets. (Incidentally, to Stravinsky’s list of ‘choices’ — Freud or Jung, etc. — might be added ‘Prokofiev or Stravinsky’.) Can it be that when Nestyev says of a certain theme of Prokofiev’s that ‘it glorifies the indestructibility of human happiness’ our eyes must not glide over the words as a mere counter of socialist realist criticism but regard them as expressing some essential difference between Prokofiev and Stravinsky (and perhaps more essentially between Prokofiev and the Viennese school, for chromaticism is the mode of unhappiness)? Again, Stravinsky’s ‘popular’ musical activity is composing jazz; Prokofiev wrote a unison sonata for massed student violins, and marches for brass bands: which is giving the hostages, being the less sensible?

     In technical realms the dice are again —  and more particularly — loaded against Prokofiev, for here Stravinsky’s clever and modern armour seems at first blush quite impregnable. How plausible his continued response to the avant garde; how praiseworthy his own eternal role as ‘promising young man’; how particularly apt at this moment of time his evaluation of Webern as ‘the juste de la musique’! By contrast, Prokofiev’s musical judgements were, according to Stravinsky, ‘usually commonplace’ and ‘often wrong’. And he relates the story of Prokofiev telling him that Petrushka should have ended in the fourth tableau at the climax of the Russian dances. ‘But it is obvious,’ Stravinsky comments, ‘to any perceptive musician that the best pages in Petrushka are the last.’ We do not know what Prokofiev had in mind but cannot help wondering if he did not think those pages, though excellent (as so much in Stravinsky) from what might be called the literary point of view, too recapitulatory and insufficiently spontaneous. Prokofiev admired this music tremendously as a whole: it was Stravinsky’s later neo-classicism he regretted: ‘generally speaking,’ he said, ‘everything which is imitative . . . has less value.’

     At the time of his conflict with the Party, Prokofiev confessed in his ‘apology’ to some instances of atonality in his own compositions, used ‘to throw the tonal passages into relief’, but he hoped ‘to rid himself of this method’. Neither the terms of this statement nor its grotesque occasion should blind us to the interesting truth that by and large the more chromatic Prokofiev’s music the more turgid and unsuccessful it is: he is most truly individual and memorable in the diatonic mode. To a Stravinsky all this is down a backwater. He has said that though Marxists try to explain atonality as a problem of social pressures, its arrival was in fact an ‘irresistible pull within the art’.

     Can a composer who took Prokofiev’s path be ‘great’? Nestyev’s book fascinatingly reminds us that at any rate Prokofiev was a prodigious worker, in the great tradition. There is, too, an impressively organic progression about much of his music — the long line of piano sonatas, for example, and the repeated return to opera often in the most unpropitious conditions. Many of his 138 opus numbers are unknown in this country, and some, because of the poisonous artistic atmosphere under Stalin, have never even been published. One would like to hear, for instance, the incidental music to Hamlet and even the Ode to the End of the War for eight harps, four pianos, brass, percussion and double basses.

     Nestyev truly says of Prokofiev (though this critic’s standards are so bedevilled by his upbringing that we cannot be sure that he means what he ought to mean) that ‘many of his melodies at first seem too restrained and have no immediate appeal for the listener. But greater familiarity with the music can make this lack of appeal seem relatively unimportant.’ That he is an original and profound melodist seems to me undeniable. The Prodigal Son is a good example of his quality. Of course, there are also Prokofievian melodies of Rachmaninovian sweep and catchiness. The important thing about them is that they remain Prokofievian and unanachronistic, and that their feeling is individual and true. Even in such a work as the Seventh Symphony, where, like the case of Aldous Huxley’s Richard Greenow, some sentimental creature from the subconscious (or the Kremlin) seized Prokofiev’s pen, the melodies are not unmemorable nor invariably cheap. (Stravinsky is a fine melodist, too, but his inspiration is altogether more effortful and studied, and besides he has had to live at times on other men’s melodies.)

     This attractiveness of Prokofiev’s, his power to draw audiences to the concert hall, the theatre and the loudspeaker (which, of course, Nestyev characterizes as his ‘realism’) Stravinsky would probably regard as of no account. He has said that listening even to serial music is always a matter of practice — that, for example, he now hears the whole first movement of Webern’s Symphony tonally, and that young people, born to such music, can do even better. Time alone can test the validity of this. Meanwhile it would be interesting to hear from musical amateurs who bought the recently available records of Webern’s complete works whether they have played them as frequently as if they contained non-serial music and whether their experience of acquiring a knowledge of the two kinds of music has been qualitatively all of a piece.