THE PEOPLE'S ARTIST: Prokofiev's Soviet Years.

• Author: Stove, R.J.
• Position: Book review
• Pages: 66(4)

THE PEOPLE'S ARTIST: Prokofiev's Soviet Years

by Simon Morrison

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Hardcover: 512 pages and index

RRP: $US29.95

Till scarcely more than a decade ago, Sergei Sergeievich Prokofiev seemed stuck with a reputation as one of those composers about whom almost no-one wants to read. Biographies of him remained frustratingly scarce, and when they did appear in any tongue, they depended again and again on the same squalidly unreliable Soviet sources.

Yet Prokofiev's name has never ceased to sell concert tickets. Nearly all pianists tackle his Third Piano Concerto (he wrote five altogether), and at least some of his nine complete piano sonatas (he left another two unfinished). His Classical Symphony is in almost every orchestra's repertoire; in Alexander Nevsky he produced one of the most widely revered movie scores ever written; his most ambitious operas, The Fiery Angel and War and Peace, once dismissed as unperformable, have been often revived of late; his Romeo and Juliet is a staple of any ballet company with the slightest claims to excellence; while there can be few record-collectors indeed whose childhood musical experiences did not include Peter and the Wolf.

Now, at last, scholarship has caught up with what public taste has long discerned. The composer's youthful diaries are today readily accessible in English, proving that he ranks among the very few great musicians capable of scintillating prose. Still more valuable is the present survey, by a Princeton music professor with awesome research skills and equally impressive ability to synthesise his findings in mostly straightforward, if occasionally over-theoretical, language. That this volume bears plaudits on its dust-jacket from Richard Taruskin, the most erudite and profound musicologist now alive (who is briefly quoted in the text), indicates its exalted standards.

Among historical illiterates there continues to fester the delusion--no doubt ultimately traceable, like so many sanctimonious legends, to Lord Acton's influence--which equates artistic liberty with political liberty. This delusion proclaims not only that the latter phenomenon is necessary for the former, but in extreme cases, that the latter is sufficient for the former. Never mind that Evelyn Waugh, more than 70 years ago, noted: "It so happens that most of the greatest art has appeared under systems of tyranny." Never mind, either, that the wittiest and best-known passage from The Third...