Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries volume 3: review

Composer, pianist and self-exiled genius, Sergey Prokofiev's Diaries show a man in constant flux, discovers Ivan Hewett.

By Ivan Hewett 11 December 2012 • 7:00am

Prokofiev at the piano, AFP Credit: Photo: AFP

Sergey Prokofiev is most people’s favourite modern composer, because he hardly seems modern at all. He marries Stravinsky’s orchestral brilliance and sarcastic neoclassicism with Tchaikovskian luxuriance of melody, and irradiates everything with a quirky, magic toy-box innocence.

This is not how Prokofiev was viewed during his self-imposed exile from Russia during the Twenties and early Thirties. These were his glory years, when he was touted in the American newspapers as a dangerous cross between a machine-age brutalist and Bolshevik revolutionary. Creatively he was in constant ferment. In the years covered by these diaries – 1924-1933 – he produced an opera and four ballets, including the last ballet produced by the Ballets Russes during Diaghilev’s lifetime. In between came three symphonies, two piano concertos, chamber works and a never-ending round of concert tours.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a somewhat breathless air about these fascinating diaries. Prokofiev is constantly moving between rented houses, always on a train for the next concert date, bumping into famous people in restaurants. The surprising thing is how often this astonishingly productive man is laid low by headaches, heart murmurs and fainting fits. His new wife, a Spanish singer named Lina but whom Prokofiev calls “Ptashka”, is even more prone to them. Time and again they turn up for a joint concert, only to find that Ptashka’s voice has given out and Prokofiev is forced to play one of his sonatas “even though I’ve not practised it for months”. He never fails to tell us how loud the applause was, on a scale from “disappointing” to “tremendous”.

This is a reminder that the bumptious and ambitious student of the first volume of diaries, who was quite capable of engineering a public humiliation for a rival student, hasn’t entirely mellowed. His great rival in Europe is Stravinsky, and Prokofiev can’t resist getting a dig in at the elder composer whenever he can, particularly at his shaky abilities as a pianist.

He remarks of a new concerto by Arthur Honegger that it was “an extremely boring work for the pianist, and technically elementary”, and adds “it would be a good new work for Stravinsky to add to his repertoire”.

But the malice is often counterbalanced by surprising surges of sympathy and affection. He has an odd mixture of shrewdness and a child’s tendency to be bewitched by one striking feature of a scene. The results are often vivid but frustrating, as in his meeting with Maxim Gorky, another self-exiled Russian, ensconced for much of the Twenties in a villa near Naples. We hope to hear some of the great man’s thoughts on art and politics, but all we discover is that Gorky is a heavy smoker and coughs continuously, “a short, dry cough, disagreeable and even frightening to hear like a dog barking”. That image of a dog barking is the authentic Prokofiev touch; one could imagine a “barking Gorky” character in one of his ballets, pictured by an oddly sinister bassoon.

Prokofiev’s naivety emerges most strongly in his unquestioning belief in Christian Science, about which he constantly harangues his friends. He pays 20 francs for a consultation with a Christian Scientist doctor, who gives him a primer to read while she goes into a trance. Prokofiev is so impressed he tries to tip her 10 francs, but the following week is puzzled when he’s afflicted with “a headache that shouldn’t be happening”.

Editor Anthony Phillips has once again lavished endless care on the translation and the footnotes. These are full of fascinating information about the swarms of Russian émigrés in Paris, some of whom were unwise enough to return to the Soviet Union and ended up in prison or murdered, some of whom made good in America (such as the composer Vladimir Dukelsky, who as Vernon Duke became the well-known composer of April in Paris and Autumn in New York).

Prokofiev was one of these insecure souls, and behind the parties and premieres one feels his increasing homesickness, exacerbated by frequent tours to Mother Russia. On a freezing morning in 1929 he crosses the border from Latvia to the USSR with Lina. “The thought returned: this was positively our last chance before it would be too late to turn back. Yes it would have been humiliating, but if it had been a matter of life or death we could have accepted it.”

Given the sadness that lay in store for Prokofiev after his final return in 1933 – the official denunciation in 1948, and the cruel persecution of Lina, who ended up in a labour camp – that would have been a small price to pay.