Rethinking Prokofiev
Rita McAllister and Christina Guillaumier
Abstract
More than sixty-five years after the composer’s death and almost thirty years since the demise of the Soviet Union, it is high time not only to take a fresh, balanced look at the output of Sergei Prokofiev, but also to probe some of the important but less studied aspects of his music. Many of his works are twentieth-century classics, but some are less familiar; others still, because of the times in which he lived, are controversial, or misunderstood, or simply unexplored. Commissioned from both established experts and younger researchers in the field, Rethinking Prokofiev is a new compendium o ... More
More than sixty-five years after the composer’s death and almost thirty years since the demise of the Soviet Union, it is high time not only to take a fresh, balanced look at the output of Sergei Prokofiev, but also to probe some of the important but less studied aspects of his music. Many of his works are twentieth-century classics, but some are less familiar; others still, because of the times in which he lived, are controversial, or misunderstood, or simply unexplored. Commissioned from both established experts and younger researchers in the field, Rethinking Prokofiev is a new compendium of essays that examine the background and context of Prokofiev’s music: his relationship to nineteenth-century Russian traditions; to the Silver Age and Symbolist composers and poets; to the culture of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s; and to his later Soviet colleagues and younger contemporaries. It investigates his reception in the West and his return to Russia, and analyzes the effect of his music on contemporary popular culture. His early, experimental piano and vocal works are explored, as well as his piano concertos, his operas, the film scores, the early ballets, and the late symphonies. The main focus of the book is the nature of the music itself. Prokofiev’s work is utterly distinctive, yet it defies easy analysis. By uncovering the contents of his sketchbooks, however, and through an empirical examination of his characteristic harmonies, melodies, cadences, and musical gestures, these chapters reveal much of what makes Prokofiev an idiosyncratic genius, his music intriguing, often dramatic, and almost always beguiling.
Keywords:
Russian composer-pianist,
twentieth-century composer,
Formalism,
Socialist Realism,
Communist Party of the USSR,
Russian opera,
Russian ballet,
Soviet symphony,
St. Petersburg Conservatory,
Russian Silver Age
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190670764 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190670764.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Rita McAllister, editor
Emeritus Professor, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Christina Guillaumier, editor
Head of Undergraduate Programmes, Royal College of Music, London
More
Less