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The People's Artist
Prokofiev's Soviet Years
Simon Morrison
504 pages
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10 halftones, 30 music examples
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235x156mm
978-0-19-518167-8
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Hardback
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27 November 2008
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This item will be ordered from OUP USA. Items ordered from OUP USA are despatched and charged as soon as we receive them, which is normally within 2 weeks
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- Based on unprecedented unrestricted access to primary source material in closed archives
- First detailed exploration of second half of Prokofievs career
- Engages with very current debates on music and politics
A study in contrasts, the career of Sergey Prokofiev spanned the globe, leaving him witness to the most significant political and historical events of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1918, after completing a program of studies at the St. Petersburg conservatory, Prokofiev escaped Russia for the United States and later France where, like most émigré artists of the time, he made Paris his home. During these hectic years, he composed three ballets and three operas, fulfilled recording contracts, and played recitals of tempestuous music. Scores were stored in suitcases, scenarios and librettos drafted on hotel letterhead. The constant uprooting and
transience fatigued him, but he regarded himself as a person of action who, personally and professionally, traveled against rather that with the current. Thus, in 1936, as political anxieties increased in Western Europe, Prokofiev escaped back to Russia. Though at first pampered by the totalitarian regime, Prokofiev soon suffered official correction and censorship. He wrote and revised his late ballets and operas to appease his bureaucratic overseers but, more often than not, his labors came to naught. Following his official condemnation in 1948, many of his compositions were withdrawn from performance. Physical illness and mental exhaustion characterized his last years. Housebound, he journeyed inward, creating a series of works on the theme of youth whose music sounds despondently
optimistic.
The reasons for Prokofievs return to Russia and the specifics of his dealings with the Stalinist regime have long been mysterious. Owing to their sensitive political and personal nature, over half of the Prokofiev documents at the Russian State Archive have been sealed since their deposit there in 1955, two years after Prokofievs premature death. The disintegration of the Soviet Union did not lead to the rescinding of this prohibition. Author Simon Morrison is the first scholar, non-Russian or Russian, to receive the privilege to study them. Alongside wholly or partly unknown score materials, Morrison has studied Prokofievs never-seen journals and diaries, the original, unexpurgated versions of his official speeches, and the bulk of his correspondence. This new
information makes possible for the first time an accurate study of the tragic second phase of Prokofievs career. Moving chronologically, Morrison alternates biographical details with discussions of Prokofievs major works, furnishing dramatic new insights into Prokofievs engagement with the Stalinist regime and the consequences that it had for his family and his health.Readership: All fans of modern concert music, musicologists and theorists interested in Russian and Soviet music and the Cold War, historians of Russian culture and society.
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Simon Morrison, Assistant Professor of Music, Princeton University
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"painstakingly describe[s] the circumstances surrounding Prokofiev in his final years" - G.S. Smith, Times Literary Supplement "The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years should be on every serious music lover's Christmas list." - David Gutman, Gramophone "comprehensive documentary study... absolutely indispensable to anyone even casually interested in this field, and all scholars working in Soviet music studies have reason to be grateful to Simon Morisson for his pioneering work" - Music and Letters
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Introduction
Chapter 1: 1935-1938
Chapter 2: 1938-39
Chapter 3: The Pushkin Centennial Scores
Chapter 4: 1940-43
Chapter 5: The Eisenstein Films and Tonya
Chapter 6: 1944-47
Chapter 7: 1948
Chapter 8: 194953
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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