DEATH OF SERGE PROKOFIEFF

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 715, 27 March 1953, Page 17

DEATH OF SERGE PROKOFIEFF

ad father was, director of the estate of the Sontzovs, and the owners never lived there. My mother played the piano rather well, chiefly Beethoven and Chopin, and this gave

me a taste for serious music from my youngest years. When I was three years old I bumped my forehead against an iron trunk, and the bump stayed for something like 25 years. A painter who did my portrait used to touch the bump and say, ‘Well, perhaps your whole talent is in this bump.’ " Serge Prokofieff (above), who died on March 8 at the age of 61, had a bigger bump of talent than possibly any other composer living in the Soviet Union. In his autobiography, from which the above passage is taken, he describes how he began to compose wheh he was only five. At nine, he had completed an opefa which, with his love for folklore material, he called The Giant. He studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Rim-sky-Korsakov and Liadoff, and his first important orchestral work was the Scythian Suite, a primitive evocation of the remote past of pagan Russia. After conducting his Classical Symphony in Petrograd in 1918, he departed for America, and his fantastic opera Love for Three Oranges was first presented in Chicago in 1921. But in the previous year he had made his home in France, where he entered into a close association with Serge Diaghileff, the impressario of the Russian Ballet, for whom he wrote his ballets The Buffoon and Le Pas D’Acier. In 1927 he made a concert tour of Russia, and returned home finally in 1934. He had to undergo considerable criticism from the commissars of Soviet music, and renounce many of his Western, or "decadent" notions of music before he was accepted | as a great Soviet composer. He wrote | incidental music for two films by Serge | Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan, the Terrible, the music for the former ' being expanded into a powerful cantata. | During the war he wrote miiltary songs, marches and a symphonic suite entitled | 1941. His most important success in the world of theatrical music was the fairy | tale for children, Peter and the Wolf, : which will probably remain his most) popular work. j