(audience applauds)- Dear friends, welcome again to Stalin, sorry, music under Stalin. And today, we're going to talk about Prokofiev. It's going to be a parallel story to the one we had last time. So, covering roughly the same period, 1936 to 42. And with hindsight, I should have put the question mark to my title, because this is a period when you don't yet say with an exclamation mark, Prokofiev The Soviet Artist, but you still have a question mark over that statement. So, the big question that everyone keeps asking, as I seen on Twitter and Facebook, why did he return to the Soviet Union? Because as you may know, he immigrated, or rather, he left Soviet Russia in 1918. He left it with permission, but he traveled East. He went on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and then over Japan and the Philippines to the US, ended up in New York. And started with a help of various Russian immigrants, a career of a composer, and a pianist, who played mostly his own music, but not just his own music. Then yeah, about 1921, he moved his base to Paris. He continued to travel, developed quite a lot of international connections, usually went on tour once a year to the US, because it was the most lucrative. And so, from our perspective, or maybe from the perspective that we've developed during the Cold War, it's a very strange decision to in 1935, 36, to return to Soviet Russia. And so, I've amassed, was been gradually accumulating during my research, various answers to this question. So, we are... We will just try to ponder in what way his decision is not completely ridiculous, and it's not quite as naive as people say. And it doesn't have a kind of evil streak to it as some people have suggested. So, as I said, he left Russia with permission from Lunacharsky, the Culture Minister. So yeah, the return was always a possibility. He never quite settled abroad, never bought a house. He never held any strong political views. He had a very interesting brain, a brain, which was different. If you read his diaries, or if you read his letters, or especially the short stories that he wrote. You realize that he's saw the world in a different way. Some people have suggested that he was on the autism spectrum, that he was neurodiverse. I mean, obviously it's a very difficult enterprise to kind of research medical history of dead composers. So, (chuckles) we are not going to do that, but there's definitely some way in which we have to understand how he thought. And he thought about world events as a kind of chess game. He was interested in what was going on, but he didn't have deep, emotional and moral involvement in those events. Nevertheless, when he was abroad, he was trying to not get too involved with the Russian immigrant, who were anti-Soviet. Yeah, it's as if so imagining that at some stage he might want to return. So, his return was a protracted, almost 10 year old process. It was 1925 when Soviet authorities first started wooing him. And they did him that not just with him, but also with Rachman, Stravinsky, as you know, to know avail. And Prokofiev went for the return trip back for the first time in 1927. He had complete adulation of his Russian public and he wanted to come back again and again. It's like he found, or regained his audience again. Another good reason for him to return is that in the west, he needed to rely on concertizing, which of course, was eating time from his composition. He had to practice the piano and that took a long time. And he was always very aware that the more he practiced it, the more he tours, the more he manages his touring, because he was his own manager as well. That detracts and distracts him from composition. And staying in Europe, or even in America was not that great at that point, you know? When the 1930s began because you had the great, great depression in America, you had the rise of fascism in Europe, which meant the various countries became closed for touring. All the touring routes had to be rethought, and he wasn't alone to want to come to Russia and find a new career there. Quite a lot of his friends were actually asking him for some kind of protection. Yeah, for a connection, connections in the Soviet Union. Help me to get a tour there, or maybe I could move, but it's just not everyone was as much wanted as he, as he was in the Soviet Union. And perhaps most importantly, he really did believe in his ability to be the leader of Soviet music. He believed that his music was suitably eternal and melodic, and accessible, to be just what they wanted. He wanted to write his music for the people, and he imagined that he would be doing it in two streams. And so, some works would be really complex and appeal to the more sophisticated people in his audience. And some more simple pieces, like pieces for children, for example, you might know, but he was really good at composing. So, all these reasons, and really very intense (chuckles) wooing. Yes, as I said, he was promised a lot of things. And the main thing that he was promised that he could just concentrate on composition, and that whatever he wanted to be performed, would be immediately performed. Every Philharmonic Society he was told would be loving just to put your concert on, at no notice at all. So, we will see how that worked out. And of course, the final thing. Yeah, he never imagined that he would not be able to travel. He just imagined that he would be continuing his international career with a base in Moscow, and that wasn't possible. There were other very important returnees, for example, Alexei Tolstoy, they're all writers, by the way. Of course, for writers, it was much more attractive to come back to the Soviet Union because they could right in Russian, and have a larger audience. But Alexei Tolstoy, he's done very well for himself. He's just, his life was a complete banquet,(chuckles) a continuous banquet when he was in the USSR. The return of Maxim Gorky, huge crowds meeting him. Alexander Kuprin, so there were other people who wanted to come back. So, once he's coming back, the struggle starts, this battle. Yeah, for this style, for the new style that his audience would require and the officials would put up with. So, this is why I call this, grappling with the Soviet style. By the way, pay attention to these lovely paintings that I put up. I think they're all, not quite socialist realists. So, in my view, most of them reflect the similar position of the artist. Yeah, who is trying to depict various Soviet subjects, such as the opening of the Moscow Metro, but in a slightly strange way. Not maybe completely realist. So, he was optimistic also because that he would be able to perform various large scale works that he wrote in the West, in Russia. And sometimes, his optimism really was quite extraordinary. He thought that the "Fiery Angel," for example, an opera about devilry would be a good thing to perform. That of course, is unimaginable, but he was an optimist by nature. He always thought that they would be performed. Now, what is the problem, really? Why did he have such trouble fitting in, even though, yeah, his music was melodic, and eternal, and maybe much more accessible in comparison to his other peers in the... Out there in the West. First of all, I think, while living abroad, he was always a few steps behind of how, yeah, the trends, the mainstreams, the fashions of Soviet music developed. Yeah, he was always trying to catch up, because it's impossible not to be there. Yeah, and kind of forward precisely. But also, he resisted, I think, just imitating these styles, because originality was very important to him. He had this pride in his individual style. He knew what to be Prokofiev was, so he still wanted, if he wanted to write a melody, even accessible melody, he would do it in his own way. And another reason, yeah, he was prone to recycling his music. Yeah, so he would take one theme that he might have used in one work and reuse it in another work. And that is something that didn't go so well with the Soviet authorities, because I think deep down, they believed that music had something inherent in it. Some content was tied to it. So, you couldn't just take one song and change the words, and completely sing it. It was the white song, White Guard song. And then, it would be the red song, that was always problematic. And Prokofiev, I think, was absolutely okay with it. It was roughly fitting, he would easily move it from one work to another, but that was kind of another reason why there was this problem. I will begin with a very interesting work, which he wrote in 1933. And that's certainly probably the first one that he writes with Soviet audience in mind. Although, it's not made explicit, there is no text, is a 20 minute orchestral piece. To my mind, it's very beautiful, very rarely performed. I think, what he's trying to do there is to create the standard Soviet narrative. Yeah, from darkness, through struggle, to victory. Yeah, victory of communist, my guess. He might be inspired by something like Shostakovich's Symphony Number Two To October. Yeah, that I showed you in one of the lectures. So, having a similar trajectory. So, let's see how this sounds. Yeah, so this is a Dark Beginning.(symphonic music) Oh, the next point, yeah, I want to play you can be associated with struggle, yeah? So, something's happening.(symphonic music) And finally, you will have a positive ending in the major. It's actually a beautiful lyrical theme. Yeah, the whole thing is a song. Yeah, so he wants it to be kind of vocal. He wants it to be very lyrical. Mm, and there's a wonderful moment here. Yeah, when he reaches for the cadence, the cadence is very protracted. Yeah, so we expect this ending. Yeah, and at the very last moment, he achieves this triumph. I think, it's beautifully done.(symphonic music) So, this was the review that he got. The principle mode of the Symphonic Song is fatigue and sickly despair. The musical material is so abstract that instead of concrete living images, where faced with melancholy immaterial arabesques. The composer's orchestral palette produces various pictures that are striking mainly for the gloomy elegiac background against which learned melodies of solo instruments appear as if lost in sound space, together with the dim sonorities of certain group of instruments. The Symphonic Song is an elegy to solitude. Its lyrical emotion is the emotion of social and cultural homelessness, in a man who is disappointed by the present, and is unable to believe in the future. It is on a par with the moods of the frustrated and weary urban lyricists of the West today. Yeah, so that's a damning criticism. The critic obviously didn't listen properly. Yeah, the critic is not very intelligent because I actually had to work quite hard to make it coherent. He can't even write sentences, but it didn't matter. Yeah, the work basically sort of stalled. Yeah, it wasn't performed much again at all, because it was taken as a foreign work rather than a Soviet work. Yeah, so they didn't hear what he actually wanted to say about it. Now, the next story is on a much larger scale, is the Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, which he started writing many years before that Anniversary. Yeah, so that actually at the start of the 30s, and it comes from the idea of setting to music, some words by Lenin. It's a modernist project, yeah? Take some words which are completely ridiculously unfit for music, and set them to music. This is what Prokofiev was known for. Yeah, so he was fascinated with this idea, and gradually, the whole thing as it became bigger and bigger, also involved quotations from Marx and Engels, yeah, from the Communist Manifesto. And also, Stalin's speeches. Yeah, as you went in towards 1937, towards the anniversary. Stalin, of course, had to be there too. So, you can see it's a fantastic work, which is much more performed than Symphonic Song. But you can see how, in a sense, he treats these images and in this very direct way. Yeah, he likes portraying things. So, if it's Spectre of Communism. Yeah, so you can literally hear, or see with your inner eye, the Spectre of Communism sort of walking towards you.(symphonic music) So, Prokofiev could have written this, yeah, so some kind of, I dunno, demon character. Yeah, in a fantastical setting, so here, this is the Spectre of Communism. Now, the words that are engraved on Marx's tomb in Highgate, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point; however, is to change it. These words here are set in part two of this cantata, and that's a wonderful thing as well, because of course, and also, set in this very direct way. Yeah, because philosophers, they were only talking. Yeah, so you can hear people talking, the choir, yeah, they're talking between themselves. Chattering, yeah, and then, the idea is to change it. You have this beautiful again, beautiful C major theme that Prokofiev is so good at writing.(symphonic music) And wanted to show you another example. This is the part which is called Revolution. And here, he clearly knew some (mumbles) music from the 20s. Yeah, he's inspired maybe by something like there was a Cantata Pass to October, collective work that involved this kind of coral declamations, and insertions of various unusual instrument. Yeah, or maybe he knew pieces like, pieces by Mosolov, like something that we heard in our first lecture. Which also have these quotations or themes that sound like folk songs, and all of that is thrown together. It's a montage. You even have Lenin speaking there. Yeah, think about it. He wanted in from... In 1937, Lenin to be shouting on stage, which is always a very funny moment. Anyway, let's hear it.(symphonic music) Accordions.(symphonic music)(singer shouts in foreign language)(singer shouts in foreign language)(symphonic music) And the siren. Yeah, the siren also very typical addition to the symphony orchestra, in this added prop pieces. So, what was wrong with that? Well, that didn't get performed either, and was kind of canceled all together, a few months before the date. And the trouble was first of all, the words were authentic words by Marx and Engels, and Lenin, and Stalin. And by that stage, this was already inappropriate. Yeah, because these were sacred words, you would not just speak them in vain. Even you would not necessarily read them, because at that point in 1938, slightly later, a book comes out, which is called,"The Short Course of the History of the CPSU," the Communist Party. And that's the book, the only book you were supposed to read.(chuckles) You weren't supposed to read Lenin, and if read Lenin's articles, you would not get that points that they wanted out of them that you want, they wanted to get you out of them. Yeah, so it's an interesting switch away from these authentic words. So, that was one problem. Yeah, another problem, I guess, was with the setting, like when Stalin's speech comes up, it's sung by a female choir. Yeah, so why? (laughs) Why is that? It's actually a beautiful theme again, it's about the constitution. So, you can see, he wanted to make it heavenly. Now, but it's a very slippery slope. So, basically it's a huge work in 10 sections, yeah? 10 big, big movements, and it was completely canceled, he could not present it at the Anniversary. So, then you get the opposite. Yeah, so he goes from this very ambitious and serious work, and very, very inventive, to something very simple and something that I decided to illustrate with this fantastic painting. Although, it's from an earlier period, but from 1925, which is kind of primitivist. Yeah, so this is what he starts doing. He starts writing very simple songs. So, his next cantata is called Songs of our Times, and it consists of nine, quite short songs. I will give you one example, maybe slightly difficult to explain to somebody who does not hale from Soviet Union, like myself, why this is so wrong. Why his setting it so wrong, but I will do my best. Yeah so, "From border to border over the summits, where a freewheeling eagle performs its flight. The people construct a beautiful song about Stalin, The Wise, our dearly beloved." Now, if you can feel the register of this song. Yeah, it's very grand. So, let's hear first, not Prokofiev's setting, but a setting by Isaak Dunaevsky, yeah, so the writer of mass songs. So, this is going to be quite loud. Yes, so we are going to bring it down slightly.(Symphonic music) And then the second theme.(symphonic music) Yeah, so you have two themes here. You have one is very kind of epic and very magnificent at the very beginning. And then, you have this very active march. Yeah, so it's two things. Now, what does Prokofiev do? So, same text.(symphonic music) The words there are very grand. Saying for example, the world of oppressors trembles with rage. Yeah. (sings softly) Yeah, it's a complete tone deafness. Yeah, as we would describe now. And suddenly, sometimes you wouldn't think, it's comedy. Yeah, today it sounds like comedy. I don't really think it was intended as comedy. Otherwise it would've been suicidal, right? So, let's get to the middle section, through the next section.(symphonic music) Did you feel, see the words? Yeah, "Fearful flame now burns even brighter, so we rise up for the last battle." Yeah. (chuckles) So, the words completely don't have anything to do with this very lyrical music. So, it came to my mind that I know where the prototype for this music is, and it's in Glinka, the famous Travelling Song by Glinka. So, yeah, 100 years before Prokofiev, and maybe if this arrangement already existed, maybe he heard it performed by the Red Army Choir and thought that that was acceptable. This is actually a marvelous arrangement of the Travelling Song, but it also has these two themes. Yeah, one is about the movement of a train and another one is about getting excited about seeing your beloved. Yeah, so here we go, this is the whole-(male speaks in foreign language) I want you to kind of feel the scene.(symphonic music) And then, you have the middle section.(symphonic music) Now, just compare it again.(symphonic music) Yeah, similar. Yeah, it's a little oompa, oompa, oompa going in the background, and this beautiful song flying. Yeah, so a good idea, Glinka is a good model at the time, very good model. Yeah, and he's trying to do, maybe if this arrangement already existed, I haven't checked. Something that the Red Army Choir would perform. Yeah, so something completely, obviously a good thing. Just not without text, yeah? So, this is me trying to explain to you why what he's doing is so wrong. It's so badly wrong. Now, let's talk about another piece, which was actually, I guess, a qualified success. But before that, we need to put his next cantata, which is called (speaks in foreign language), A Hail to Stalin, or a Toast to Stalin, sometimes translated in context, in the context of "The Cult of Stalin.""The Cult of Stalin" was very gradually increasing during the 30s. In 1933, people were still commenting with amazement that suddenly, you get all these portraits of leaders, yeah, on the day of the festival. So, they didn't have them before. Yeah, and suddenly everyone started carrying the same portrait. So, that was kind of strange. Musically, one of the first things, the first things started coming from the republics, rather than from the center. So, this is one of the first thing, which came for the Ukrainian Festival of Music. Yeah, so the idea was that the best representatives of Ukraine in arts come to Moscow to report on the achievements. Yeah, and also express gratitude to the leader. So, this is a song by Lev Revuts'ky, yeah, Song About Stalin. You can see by the way, how it was scratched out. Yeah, so that's during destalinisation. I just thought it'd be nice to have that.(symphonic music) This is quite simple, yeah? But it's in a folk style, the style of a folk song. So, that's totally acceptable. They really were into creating these folk verses, which we today called fake law. Yeah, we would find somebody like this person, Jumbyl Jabaiuly, who was an akin. Yeah, so he was a epic singer in Kazakhstan. The problem was he didn't speak Russian, so they would get him to sing something. And then, a team of translators would turn it into this glory for Stalin. And things like that were collected from all, or collected, or written. Yeah, from all the republics, and into this book. I'm very proud to own it. Yeah, so this is a kind of huge collection of these verses. They're extremely funny as you start to read them, they're sort of unbelievable, but they have these lavish portraits of Stalin, and Lenin, and so on. So, this was a new fashion. You had to dress up this glory for Stalin in national garb. And somehow, I think, it makes sense because it makes it not quite so embarrassing, yeah? Because the words are very naive. It's so, so excessive, but it's not us, the composers who are doing it. It's the people. Yeah, and the people, of course, expressing their feelings in this very naive way. And we can just sort of benignly smile at this. Another example of that is Aram Khachaturian's poem about Stalin, which is also written in this national style, and it's not even in a major key. This is what's so interesting about it.(symphonic music) Yeah, so you can hear. Yeah, this kind of Oriental style that he uses then. So, Prokofiev did exactly the same, and that what this is a much later poster, but is the idea. Yeah, that people from different republics come to verify Stalin. And he uses a compilation, a montage of these different verses from different parts of the Soviet Union. But what he does at the start, he writes again, a beautiful theme in C major, which kind of unifies all of these little bitties that are in the middle. And this is really, I think, a step towards establishing something new in the Stalin cult. I think, even Shostakovitch was impressed by that theme, and then, many years later, tried to do something similar in his song of The Forest.(symphonic music) I like this (mumbles indistinctly) conducting it and the rehearsal with the sarcastic smile. (laughs) I really wanted you to see that. So, what happens with these verses? Again, the verses are very naive. Yeah, "The sun is shining differently on over us. It must have visited Stalin and the Kremlin," and the setting is quite peculiar. So that in recent times, people have trying to read it as a kind of ironic statement. And they noticed that the first time Stalin is mentioned, yeah, it's the interval of a tri tone, yeah, the devil's interval. (chuckles) So, they were trying to sort of show that actually, Prokofiev was trying to put some secret message into this. And I don't know, it's a fact that there is a tri tone, yeah? But knowing everything that we know about Prokofiev knowing everything that he... How he wanted to be the leader of Soviet music at this time, but would really keep... Was trying to write as many of these official pieces in various styles as possible. He was trying to win this game. You know, why would he intentionally sabotage himself? So, it doesn't make sense. It maybe is just part of Prokofiev's grotesque style. He has a cold, grotesque style, which he got so used to that he didn't notice it. And actually, that was the feature of his style that always brought him trouble in the Soviet Union. But not this time, yeah, somehow they swallowed it.(symphonic music) So, there was a problem there, the problematic moment. Yeah, too much text was fitted in, into this preparation for the big climax, yeah? So, the text again was about Stalin suffering in terrorist prisons and things like that. Yeah, so again, not a good thing to set it as this kind of buffer recitative. Yeah. (laughs) So, that was pointed out in one of the reviews, but nevertheless, yeah, this piece kind of passed amazingly, passed mast and was recorded at the time. And of course, then it wasn't performed after the death of Stalin for many years. And then when it was performed, it was destalinized. I mean, you might be surprised that a work about Stalin could be destalinized, yeah, but you can do everything. Because the music was so wonderful and people wanted to hear it, wanted to save it. So, they rewrote the lyrics, same thing as happens in the visual art, as you can see. One little example that I wanted to give from 1939 song, where he again gets it wrong. So, it's not... It's just like as if he's getting it right only by luck. Yeah, he doesn't quite understand what to do. So, this is a song about Stakhanovite woman. Yeah, if you know who that was, yeah, that was all about raising productivity. So, then suddenly someone was producing 100 times more than the normal worker. Yeah, and they became a hero and they were given valuable gifts, and meet visits to the Kremlin, maybe got to see Stalin and so on. So, that was a very interesting moment in Soviet history, when suddenly all talk of equality went out of the window because you started creating heroes out of ordinary people. And so, these people now could have an American dream. It was a very interesting moment. Anyway, so Stakhanovka might be somebody like that, and she works in a textile factory, or she might be someone like that already reporting. Yeah, very powerfully about her achievements, and the music that Prokofiev wrote is this.(symphonic music) I think, you're guessing (chuckles), yeah, that is not right either. In fact, I thought it might have inspired Shostakovich in one of his satires, which he wrote much, much later. It's the same kind of obsessive focus on the third. Yeah, so when Prokofiev he had, (sings) it's constantly only kind, almost kind of idiotically repeating this interval. This is the primitivism thing. And Shostakovich does this on purpose, of course.(symphonic music) Yeah, it's so...(chuckles) So, it's a kind of... He probably saw this Prokofiev song once and thought, this is really so bad.(chuckles) So, very briefly about Prokofiev's very different trajectory at that time. Yeah, do you remember that we were talking about Shostakovich suffering both his lowest point, and then a very high point with his Fifth Symphony. And what was Prokofiev doing all that time? It seems like after he came back, he was sort of forgotten in quarantine, really. They put him in some kind of decontamination chamber because he arrived from the West. And forgotten about, forgot about him mainly because so many pieces that he wrote, so many projects were canceled for various reasons. There were older works that were not produced that he expected to be produced. There were older works that were performed, but criticized. So, always, he suffered from that. Mm, even Romeo and Juliet, yeah, famously was delayed. There was something that he wrote, yeah with Eisenstein, film score music for Alexander Nevsky. Which had to be withdrawn because the Russians, yeah, signed the pact, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler. Yeah, so the anti German film could not be, (chuckles) shown anymore. So, he was remarkably unlucky in various ways. Yeah, and then there were arrests right next to him. Natalia Sats, who commissioned"Peter and the Wolf," was arrested very soon after. Although, that was a successful piece. Of course, the moment he wanted to actually have Meyerhold produce one of his operas, Meyerhold was arrested too. Yeah, and so on. And when the Stalin Prizes come in 1941, Prokofiev was the only person who was actually voted for. Yeah, so it was already in the list, it went up to the government. But then when he opened the newspaper on the day, his name wasn't there. So, you can imagine how that felt. Yeah, so he was singled out, his Alexander Nevsky cantata was not awarded. And even though Romeo and Juliet, Lana who danced Juliet was given the Stalin Prize. Yeah, this is a picture from the premier. He was completely passed over and nobody even suggested Romeo and Juliet for the prize. So, a very strange situation, the situation where he's really struggling. Very briefly about the work that we are going to perform for you today. And this, I suppose, again, is a qualified success. This is a work already from the war time when he was evacuated to Nalchik, which was in the Bulkarian Republic, in the mountains. And it was a commission from Khatu Temirkanov, actually the father of the conducted Temirkanov that you might have heard of. Who was their cultural official, he didn't survive the war. He perished in the war during the occupation, but he suggested to Prokofiev that Prokofiev writes something on national themes. And Prokofiev almost never writes on national themes, yeah? Because themes, melodies for him is something that he is really proud of. So, why would he take somebody else's material? He only did it once before in the Jewish Overture. Yeah, Overture on Hebrew Themes, and that was also a very successful thing. So, yeah. So, he writes this piece and apparently, yeah, he asked Temirkanov, "Is it okay if I write a complex piece?" Maybe your people will not be able to understand it straight away. And he says, "Well, don't worry, they will grow up to your music and they will enjoy it later." So, this is what happened, Prokofiev again, managed to do this very socialist, realist thing. Yeah, writing folk tunes on his own terms. You will hear that this music has a lot of very, very juicy, very fruity harmonies, starting from the word go. That it has lots of interesting ways of playing the string instruments, all the different types of pizzicato, or sul ponticello, whatever, (mumbles), all these different things. And it reminds me, not even so much of Bartu, of course, Szymanowski as people have suggested, but of de Falla, which is kind of had this Spanish style, which was also quite modernist. Just for a little bit. Yeah, it's kind of the harmonic aura of de Falla's concerto.(classic music) So, you can hear this stacked up chords. You will hear some of that kind of music in Prokofiev's quartet as well. So, enjoy, we are going to perform the whole piece. It's going to be the bottom string quartet. They're all postgraduate students from the Guildhall and also, from the Royal College of Music. They've learned this piece especially for this occasion, it's their project. So, please give them a very, very warm welcome.(audience applauds)(symphonic music)(symphonic music)(symphonic music)(audience applauds)(symphonic music)(audience applauds loudly) Well, isn't this beautiful music? Yeah, and rarely performed. Yeah, much rarer than the Shostakovich quartets, which are played all the time. Yeah, so be aware of this. I just wanted to mention that obviously, we are not leaving Prokofiev yet. Yeah, because he still has a few years to live. So, we'll come back to him in the next two lectures. And please, also look out for another, there are another three regression lectures that I already done on this composer. One on the "War and Peace Opera," on the "Prodigal Son, the Ballet," and on "Piano Music" with Peter (mumbles) last year. So, please look out for them, and thank you very much for your attention.(audience applauds)