Word: prokofiev
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...charming little musical fairy tale, Peter and the Wolf, which he wrote to help children identify orchestral instruments, that Prokofiev is mainly known to the U.S. man in the street. He brought the piece to Koussevitsky, tartly recommending it as suitably infantile for Boston and its critics - who had severely panned his Fourth Symphony. Cinemactor Basil Rathbone and Actor-Singer Richard Hale as narrators have made recordings which are now perennial Christmas best sellers. Last season it was played twelve times by U.S. symphony orchestras; it was also dance-timed by Guy Lombardo's Royal Canadians (TIME...
Superfluous People. Prokofiev was a mature composer with a cosmopolitan background and a fully developed style when he returned. In the mid-'30s, Russia did not shoot but it did ostracize composers whose music did not keep time to the Marxian metronome. Prokofiev's first Soviet piece, Symphonic Song, was scorned by Russian critics for its "morbid resignation" and its "tendencies of urbanized lyricism." Wrote Soviet critic A. Ostretsov: "We do not dispute Prokofiev's right to reflect the emotional world of 'superfluous' people in the West, with their rottenness and putrefaction...
...Prokofiev is not so well known in the U.S. for the kind of superpatriotic melodrama that characterized Shostakovich's Leningrad and May Day symphonies. But he has written his share. In 1939, as a birthday present to his boss, he wrote a piece called Homage to Stalin. He also did a Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, using words by Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Except for a Romeo and Juliet suite, nearly everything he has written in the U.S.S.R. has been built on Russian folk themes, and to glorify Russia's past and present...
...When the Prokofievs had to leave Moscow during 1941, he went one way (to the Caucasus) and his wife and two sons. 20 and 16, another. He has been separated ever since from his wife, a Spanish singer named Lina Llubera whom he met on his first trip to Manhattan. Prokofiev now lives in a Moscow apartment with a tall, intense young writer named Mira Mendelssohn, who helped him on the libretto for War and Peace, the Tolstoyan opera which had its tryout last March. Stalin had promised to let Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera produce it, but after...
Income: "Plenty." The Soviet Government, which considers music as serious a subject as farming or factory work, has made high-grade musical composition a paying proposition. Soviet composers today are counted not only among the most respected but among the wealthiest citizens of the Soviet Union. Prokofiev, like a cautious capitalist, says of his income: "It is plenty...