April 23 is one of my favorite days, every year. The grass has turned a deep, living green, the trees are starting to flower, and two of my favorite geniuses have birthdays: William Shakespeare and Sergei Prokofiev. Shakespeare’s plays and poems have been an ongoing source of amazement and comfort to me in good times and bad. Prokofiev has been one of my favorite composers since I was age 11.
Prokofiev was born in a village in Ukraine in 1891. He was a musical prodigy who started studying at the St. Petersburg Conservatory at age 13. By many accounts, his people skills were lacking. He seems to have had a robust ego and not much tact. He also had a spiky, self-assured voice that developed early and stayed strong throughout his career. Complications related to the Russian revolution led to his spending a couple of decades in the 1920s and ‘30s concertizing and composing in the United States and Europe. He missed Russia, though, and returned to the Soviet Union to live in 1933.
My first encounter with Prokofiev was with his 1936 children’s classic Peter and the Wolf. This piece, for orchestra and narrator, introduces listeners to the instruments of the orchestra by associating each character in the story with an instrument. The story also reinforces Soviet propaganda about how youths should behave, which zoomed high over my head. My parents bought the Disney-fied version, a record set with Sterling Holloway, better known as the voice of Winnie the Pooh, as narrator, plus a picture book telling the story. I loved that Prokofiev had given the role of the cat to the clarinet, the instrument I’d recently started to learn. The accelerating arpeggios as the cat climbed the tree to get away from the wolf were way beyond me (it’s a scary enough cadenza to appear on many major orchestra audition lists), but I soon figured out how to play the cat theme.
I searched the family record collection for more Prokofiev and found several albums with his and other Russian composers’ works. Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Prokofiev, filled with fiery melodies and vivid orchestration. I loved them all, but Prokofiev the most.
I’d stack albums with Romeo and Juliet, Lt. Kije, and Love for Three Oranges on the spindle of our stereo and walk with my book in circles around the living room, listening and reading. It was one of my ways of stimming, which is short for “self-stimulating behaviors,” a term for the repetitive movements that all humans do in response to being bored, nervous, or tense. These are often more noticeable and considered more “problematic” in people on the autistic spectrum. Fortunately my parents didn’t complain. I found something exhilarating about the way Prokofiev would take a melody to places it shouldn’t go, but did.
Some musicologists seem to have a disdain for Prokofiev. It might be because his music used conventional structures and was tonal at a time when serialism was more in fashion. Or it might be his idiosyncratic melodies, which are sometimes described dismissively as “quirky.” Or maybe it’s for Cold War reasons (Stravinsky, the other big Russian composer of the time, stayed an ex-pat, and it seems that a fair number of scholars took “his” side). Or maybe it’s because of Prokofiev’s popularity with audiences.
Access to a bigger music library at college let me explore Prokofiev in more depth. Soon I had new favorites: the piano concertos, especially the third, its opening featuring the clarinet section, hooray!, the piano sonatas, the later symphonies, Visions Fugitives, the Sonata in D for violin and piano. So many pieces from so many genres: operas, ballets, and movie scores, as well as symphonies and sonatas. All in that voice.
Sadly, Prokofiev’s voice was muffled when he fell into disfavor during one of the Soviet Union’s artistic corrections in the late 1940s. Many of his pieces were censored. He became a recluse, staying mostly in his home outside Moscow, but, lucky for us, he continued writing new music. By the time he died, on March 5, 1953—the same day as Stalin—he’d added even more symphonies and operas and ballets to his oeuvre.
When I became a parent, I hoped that Sonny would like Prokofiev’s voice, too. When he was four, we acquired a video version of Peter and the Wolf, starring Elmo of Sesame Street and the Boston Pops. Sonny already had a favorite composer by that point (Schubert), but he watched the video a lot. His favorite character was the grandfather, who is represented by the bassoon. Sonny built himself a cardboard bassoon and made it part of his stimming–in his case, running in the basement–trotting back and forth holding it while puffing out his cheeks. When the time came, six years later, for him to pick a wind instrument to study—he chose bassoon. I wonder how many other people have had a lifelong passion for an instrument ignited by this composer…I bet there are more than a few. Which makes Prokofiev eminently worthy of celebration.
Happy 130th birthday Prokofiev!
the jeanSpace 