Composer, Soviet-Style

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In the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the intermission had just ended.

It was exactly 9:30 p.m. A woman announcer in a black dress stepped to the platform. Said she: "In the name of the fatherland there will be a salute to the gallant warriors of the First Ukrainian front who have broken the defenses of the Germans -- 20 volleys of artillery from 224 guns." The dark days of Stalingrad were over; the Polish offensive of January 1945 had begun.

As she spoke, the first distant volley shook the hall. A lank, bald-headed man in white tie and tails, who bore a slight resemblance to U.S. Senator Robert Taft, mounted the podium and stood with bowed head, facing the Moscow State Philharmonic. He seemed to be counting off the rumbles of artillery. At the 20th, he raised his baton and began the world's premiere of his newest symphony. The bald-headed conductor was Russia's great est living musician, Sergei Prokofiev.

Last week in Boston's Renaissance Symphony Hall, that same music, Prokofiev's Fifth, had its U.S. premiere. It was large in scale, a great, brassy creation with some of the intricate efficiency and dynamic energy of a Soviet power plant and some of the pastoral lyricism of a Chekhov countryside. The man who introduced it to the U.S., the Boston Sym phony's famed Russian-born Sergei Kous-sevitsky, was ecstatic. He called the Fifth "the greatest musical event in many, many years. The greatest since Brahms and Tchaikovsky! It is magnificent! It is yesterday, it is today, it is tomorrow. . . .

Prokofiev is the greatest musician today! Nobody else can write with such technical perfection, with such instrumentation. And all the time there is beautiful melody ! " Peter and the Wolves. Not all Boston's music-goers share Koussevitsky's enthusi asm for his fellow Russians -- Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich -- but they respect his judgment. Koussevitsky rates 39-year-old Shostakovich as a great-composer-to-be and 54-year-old Prokofiev as a great composer who has already arrived.

It is for the 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, Nov. 12). In U.S. phonograph-record sales -- principally because of Peter and the Wolf--Prokofiev rates above Mozart, though far below Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.

In Russia even Prokofiev's longest works enjoy a mass popularity comparable to that of U.S. best-selling books. While Americans were listening to the Fifth last week, Moscow was awaiting the first performance of Ode to the End of the War, scored for an orchestra with no string section, but with eight harps and four grand pianos thrown in. While he was writing the Fifth, Prokofiev also turned out a new long ballet, Cinderella, an elaborate cinema score for Sergei Eisenstein's picture Ivan the Terrible (he had previously scored Eisenstein's Alexander

Nevsky) and an ambitious opera based on Tolstoi's War and Peace.

Train of Thoughts. When a newsman asked Prokofiev what he was trying to say in his Fifth Symphony, Prokofiev answered: "It is about the spirit of man, his soul or something like that." The impatient, offhand answer was characteristic. Like most musicians, Prokofiev thinks his music should speak for itself.

He composes with the cold matter-of-factness of a mathematician, and keeps stacks of copybooks in which he hoards themes for use in future compositions. He jumps from bed to jot one down; they occur to him while taking walks, and especially while riding on trains, where he finds the metronomic clackety-click of the wheels a spur to composition. When he has saved up enough little scraps of melody, he works out an idea for a large composition to use them in. The Fifth Symphony was based on a twoyears' accumulation; the actual writing took him only two months.

He works regularly between the hours of 10 and noon every day. When he is seriously at work he never listens to anybody else's music; he only goes to Moscow concerts when he is dry. He says he likes to listen to bad music, because it teaches him what faults to avoid in his own. He continually rewrites. Says he: "The moment a composer finds his language and says 'I've got it' he ceases to be interesting."

A Wide Reach. Tall (6 ft. 1 in.), gangling Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev has a clumsy, self-conscious appearance, and lanky, outsize hands which can stretch close to an octave and a half of piano keyboard. The scarecrow awkwardness is particularly apparent when he conducts: he bends only at the knees, so that he constantly seems in danger of toppling over. His idea of relaxation is a game of double solitaire, or of chess. When traveling in the U.S. he carried a miniature set of chessmen around in his pocket, always hopeful of finding someone he could beat. He neither drinks nor smokes, but found it hard during the war to do without candy.

Probably the least typical of all present-day Soviet composers, most of whom have never been outside the Russian wall, Prokofiev has spent a good deal of his career in France, England and the U.S., as a refugee from the Government he now helps to glorify. His father managed a big estate in the southern Russian village of Sontzovka. His mother, a pianist, brought him up on Beethoven and Chopin. Says precocious Prokofiev: "At six I wrote down myself a valse . . . and I composed a march for four hands when I was seven." By the time he was eight he was writing an opera in three acts and six tableaux. His parents, startled and impressed, packed him off to Moscow to study composition with a famous pedagogue and minor composer named Alexander Taneyev. At the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev's dynamic and dissonant compositions got him the name of the "wild boy wonder." Pedagogue Taneyev, hearing some of the wild boy's music, murmured, "Good Lord! Am I responsible for this?"

When critics scorned his discordant Scythian Suite (1914), Prokofiev turned out the Classical Symphony, just to show them that he was also a master of the past. The Classical Symphony has remained one of his half-dozen most popular works.

Prokofiev, 23 when World War I broke out, was not caught in the Tsar's draft because he was a widow's only son. He and his mother fled Russia in 1918, after the Communist revolution. The officer who gave him his passport told Prokofiev: "You are revolutionary in art as we are in politics. You ought not to leave us now."

For Russian music, the Bolshevik revolution marked an esthetic as well as a political turning point. The late great Sergei Rachmaninoff left Russia, never to return. Igor (Le Sacre du Printemps) Stravinsky, who was already out of the country, has since lived in France and the U.S. A few older conservatives like Rhein-old Glier and Nicolai Myaskovsky stayed on in the U.S.S.R., and came to satisfactory terms with the new Soviet regime. The post-revolutionary generation in which Dmitri Shostakovich grew up was not yet out of music school.

In Paris, Prokofiev and Koussevitsky, who had also fled Russia, strolled the boulevards, drank red wine and ate frogs' legs. Prokofiev's smart, barbaric ballet scores, written for Sergei Diaghilev's emigre Ballet Russe, were a Left Bank rage. Koussevitsky conducted Prokofiev music in what were called the "Concerts Koussevitsky."

In the late '20s, Prokofiev got homesick--or) as he put it, "I became convinced that the artist should not stray away from his native sources." To win Russia's sympathy, he wrote an Age of Steel ballet, using whirring strings and bleating trumpets to glorify life in a Soviet village. Raucous passages called The Factory and The Hammers so pleased the Communists that Prokofiev was warmly welcomed when he visited Russia on concert tours. In 1938, after 20-c- years of exile, he settled in Moscow again.

Sergei Prokofiev, a man of practical habits, had been a success under the Tsar; he was a success in exile; he is now a success in Soviet Russia.

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 . . . but we do not share the . . . humanistic sympathy with these persons." Prokofiev apparently weighed and understood the demands of Russia's musical dictatorship. He learned not to deviate from the acceptable line.

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. And his hard, brilliant, unsentimental, highly polished music had just the qualities the Bolsheviks liked. He soon became the most influential composer in Russia, and even non-Russians had to admit that no other composer in the world could match him in technical adroitness and flash.

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 its Moscow premiere, War and Peace was hastily withdrawn for reworking. Soviet critics objected mostly to Mira's unwieldy text.

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."

Russia's music is systematically organized--from the mightiest flames of Russian creative inspiration down to the lowliest tuba spit valve. A Soviet bureau called Glavnoe Musicalno Pravelenya (Glavmus for short) spends over 6,000,000 rubles a year ($1,200,000) keeping Soviet composers well-fed and commissioning them to write operas and symphnies. It even runs a "composers' country house" at Ivanovo, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, where all good Russian composers go in the summertime. One of Russia's top composers, Armenian-born Aran Khachaturian, calls it "an institution for the production of masterpieces and pigs." The estate has 66 cows, 8,000 chickens and ducks, 135 pigs, and room for 20 com posers. In the main building the composers eat, sleep, loaf and criticize each other's music. Nearby are five dachas, or cottages, where each composer can lock himself in to work in privacy. There, during the past two summers, Shostakovich finished his Eighth Symphony, Khachaturian, his Second, and Prokofiev finished his Fifth and began his Sixth. Prokofiev worked in a glassed-in verandah -- containing couch, grand piano, chair and table --overlooking a pond where Ivanovo village kids swim.

Prokofiev's music, like everybody else's in Soviet Russia, has to be okayed first by his fellow composers in a private "sitting," before it can be played in public. The sittings were pretty rough during the 1936-37 purge of "formalism" in music -- which meant an end to fancy musical tricks that the masses could not understand. Shosta kovich was a prime target, and Prokofiev caught a few glancing blows. Now, considering that at one sitting rival composers can make or break a year's work by one of their colleagues, the sessions are fairly harmonious. Fellow members, regarding another's work in the communal spirit, can tell him he has been composing too many chamber works, and should change his pace. Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony was commissioned (the going price for sym phonies: from 8,000 rubles up, plus performance bonuses) after his fellows decided that, since his last symphony was written in 1930, it was high time for another.

At first Prokofiev, the ex-emigre, was held suspect by the others, but the indus try with which he turned out marching songs and heroic legends during the war, despite recent stretches of illness, seems to have proved his musical patriotism.

Says Khachaturian: "He has behaved like a real Soviet citizen." Aggressive Rhythms. Whether Glav mus is getting its money's worth in quality is for future generations to judge. But of its stimulating effect on quantity production there can be no doubt. Since 1939, recognized Soviet composers have written more than 66 symphonies, 46 operas, 22 ballets, 150 orchestral suites, fantasies and overtures, 40 cantatas, 400 smaller choral works and 150 quartets, quintets and other chamber music. Much of it is pretty uniform in style: restless, intensely energetic music, full of theatrical climaxes and aggressive rhythms, as cannily constructed, and at its worst about as emotionally appealing, as a linotype.

Russia's musica, tradition is still less than a century old: the "father" of Russian music, Michael Ivanovitch Glinka, died in 1857. Yet it already boasts some of music's most famous names--such pre-Soviet romantics as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov. The younger Soviet composers are generally more gifted and expert than those of the U.S., less jaded than those of Western Europe. Western Europe's only living first-raters, Germany's Richard Strauss and Finland's Jan Sibelius, are aged men whose best work is already a generation old.

The Soviet's musical powerhouse works like a group of high-pressure advertising men, efficiently turning out a commodity of proved effectiveness. One of their main jobs is to advertise the Soviet Union and Soviet culture to the rest of the world.

How well that job has been done can be judged from the worldwide fame of Composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Cold Garrets & Warm Music. A considerable amount of immortal music has been written in cold garrets, with an empty larder in the background. Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn lived comfortable lives, but Mozart, after a life of penny-counting, was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave, and Franz Schubert sold his songs for as little as 20-c-.

Nearly all the great composers have been men of intensely religious or mystical rather than materialistic temperament.

So far, Soviet Russia's bright new music, for all its brilliant streamlining, has conspicuously lacked the heartwarming, human quality -- the "humanistic sympathy" so despised by Communists --that earns great symphonies and operas the love of succeeding generations. But the commissars of Glavmus, looking west ward, can well ask where better symphonies and operas are being written today.

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