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Prokofiev: His life as a composer in Stalinist Russia
Member rating: No Rating | Words: | Submitted: Mon Oct 13 2003
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Prokofiev: His life Prokofiev lived and composed in Stalinist Russia for 20 years, saw his wife hustled off to a labour camp, and died on the same day as the dictator in 1953. Peter Conrad finds both civic duty and subterfuge in his music. Ever since Thomas Mann extolled the "sufferings and greatness" of Wagner, we have expected composers to lead heroic lives, of which their music is the fraught, arduous, ultimately triumphant record. Strauss even wrote a symphonic autobiography called Bin Heldenleben, in which his grandiose achievement is to pummel and rout a gang of sneering critics. Mahler, thanks to his illness, qualified for martyrdom; so did Shostakovich, tormented by Stalin's cultural bureaucrats. We are less sure what to think of composers who settle for diligent, lucrative professional careers, and refuse to dramatise their own miseries - Stravinsky, for instance, who mocked the idea that music expressed emotion and took pride...
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