Rethinking Prokofiev

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 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.