Prokofiev, Sergey

Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas: A Guide for the Listener and the Performer

Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1907-1914: Prodigious Youth

Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.

Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. In candid and lively prose, he records the all-too-normal preoccupations of a young man making his way in the brilliant social and artistic circles of the prewar Russian capital. Virtually every artist and musician of note appears in these pages, in penetrating and not always flattering vignettes. Prokofiev's main subject, however, is music, its creation and its performance. He reveals his own developing aesthetic principles through his assessments of the works of others, even as he composes such early masterpieces as the First and Second Piano Concertos, The Ugly Duckling, the First Violin Concerto, and the Classical Symphony.

An inexhaustibly rich portrait of a vibrant artistic culture on the edge of war and revolution, Prokofiev's Diaries are both a dramatic illumination of a great composer's creativity and an indispensable contribution to our understanding of musical modernism. They constitute an essential and entertaining reference for all lovers of Prokofiev's music.

Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography

The prolific creator of such classic popular works as Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, and Cinderella, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was one of the most important and influential composers of the twentieth century.

Drawing on unprecedented access to previously unknown or unavailable Russian-language sources, including extensive archival material, Harlow Robinson traces Prokofiev's extraordinary life from the fairy-tale world of Czarist Russia, through his many years abroad in America and Europe, to his perlexing permanent return to Moscow in 1936 under the Soviet Regime. That Prokofiev died on the very day as Josef Stalin, his principal persecutor, was the final irony of his intense and enigmatic career.

Prokofiev (Lives and Times)

The story of the life and times of Prokofiev. It is part of a series which relates the lives of famous people and also provides evidence for each story. Children are encouraged to think about how we know about each individual and the events that made them famous. More generally, they are encouraged to think about how we form impressions of history through evidence or reporting of events. This book contains six spreads of biography illustrated with full-colour reconstructions; four photographic spreads discussing what we know about Prokofiev's life; and a glossary (including a pronunciation guide) and index.

Selected Letters Of Sergei Prokofiev

One of the most important and influential composers of the twentieth century, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was also a prolific and gifted writer. Besides producing diaries, short stories, dramas, reviews, and the libretti for his own operas, Prokofiev conducted lively and frequent correspondence with family friends, classmates, and notable cultural figures in the Soviet Union and abroad. This engaging volume collects for the first time in English the most representative and enlightening of Prokofiev's letters, including some previously suppressed missives that have never before been published. Expertly translated and annotated by Harlow Robinson, the correspondence presented here covers Prokofiev's earliest years at St. Petersburg Conservatory, his extensive worldwide travels, and his return to Moscow. Among the correspondents are childhood friend Vera Alpers, harpist Eleonora Damskaya, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Soviet critic Boris Asafiev, composers Vernon Duke and Nikolai Miaskovsky, soprano Nina Koshetz, musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, violinist Jascha Heifetz, conductor Serge Koussevitsky, and film director Sergei Eisenstein. Prokofiev vividly describes, often with dramatic flair and a quirky sense of humor, concerts, performances, his compositions, political events, and meetings with other musicians and composers. His observations are peppered with musical gossip as well as eccentric, original, and disarmingly apolitical insights. Like his music, the writing style is laconic, brisk and tart, full of energy. Taken together, the letters provide a cultural and musical history unequaled in the correspondence of any othermodern composer. This indispensable edition will shed new light on Prokofiev's misunderstood life and career, illuminate his creative processes and aesthetic principles, and introduce his exceptional literary talents to those already captivated by his musical genius.

Modernism in Russian Piano Music: Skriabin, Prokofiev, and Their Russian Contemporaries (Russian Music Studies)

Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A composer's memoir

The Music of Sergei Prokofiev (Composers of the Twentieth Century Serie)

This work is a comprehensive analytical study of the music of Sergei Prokofiev. Neil Minturn sets the Russian composer's work in historical, cultural, and autobiographical context and examines a representative sampling of his compositions from a theoretical point of view. Minturn finds a central theme of Prokofiev's oeuvre to be the interplay between tradition and innovation. He discusses the composer's diverse compositional procedures (tonal versus "modern" devices), as well as the political and cultural influences on Prokofiev's works. Minturn shows how the contents and structure of individual pieces and movements took shape, how Prokofiev developed the notion of five musical lines, and how the idea of the "wrong note" in his music plays out. A constant harmonic and rhythmic sense permeates Prokofiev's evolving style, as measured by relatively "harmonic" or "contrapuntal" emphasis. Minturn analyses works for piano, orchestra, various chamber ensembles, and voice (including the opera, "The Gambler") and considers works in each category from various periods in Prokofiev's career. For readers with an interest in a particular work, the analyses stand alone and need not be read sequentially.

Sergei Prokofiev: A Soviet tragedy : the case of Sergei Prokofiev, his life & work, his critics, and his executioners

Prokofiev: The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers