Serge Prokofieff was born on April 23, 1891, in an atmosphere of music and culture at Sontsovka in the south of Russia, where his father managed a large estate. He seems to have begun composing almost before he could write his own name, thanks to the influence and coaching of his mother, an accomplished pianist. At the age of five he had already put together a little composition called “Hindu Galop,” and there is a photograph of the nine-year-old boy seated at an upright piano with the score of his first opera, “The Giant.” Prokofieff himself has given us a picture of the boy and his mother in their first musical adventures together:—
“One day when mother was practising exercises by Hanon, I went up to the piano and asked if I might play my own music on the two highest octaves of the keyboard. To my surprise she agreed, in spite of the resulting cacophony. This lured me to the piano, and soon I began to climb up to the keyboard all by myself and try to pick out some little tune. One such tune I repeated several times, so that mother noticed it and decided to write it down.
“My efforts at that time consisted of either sitting at the piano and making up tunes which I could not write down, or sitting at the table and drawing notes which could not be played. I just drew them like designs, as other children draw trains and people, because I was always seeing notes on the piano stand. One day I brought one of my papers covered with notes and said:
“‘Here, I’ve composed a Liszt Rhapsody!’
“I was under the impression that a Liszt Rhapsody was a double name of a composition, like a sonata-fantasia. Mother had to explain to me that I couldn’t have composed a Liszt Rhapsody because a rhapsody was a form of musical composition, and Liszt was the name of the composer who had written it. Furthermore, I learned that it was wrong to write music on a staff of nine lines without any divisions, and that it should be written on a five-line staff with division into measures. I was greatly impressed by the way mother wrote down my ‘Hindu Galop’ and soon, with her help, I learned something about how to write music. I couldn’t always put my thoughts into notes, but I actually began to write down little songs which could be played.”
Prokofieff also recalled how much his mother stressed the importance of a love for music and how she tried to keep it unmarred by excessive practising. There was only a minimum of that hateful chore, but a maximum of listening to the great classics of the keyboard. At first the lessons between mother and son were limited to twenty minutes a day. This was extended to one hour when Prokofieff was nine. “Fearing above all the dullness of sitting and drumming one thing over and over,” Prokofieff wrote, “mother hurried to keep me supplied with new pieces so that the amount of music I studied was enormous.”
This exposure to music continued when the family moved to Moscow. There Prokofieff attended the opera repeatedly and soon developed a taste for composing for voice himself. One of these early efforts was submitted to the composer Taneieff, who advised the family to send their son to Reinhold Gliere for further study. This early attraction for the theatre was later to culminate not only in several operas of marked originality but in numerous scores for ballet and the screen. To the end Prokofieff never quite lost his childhood passion for the stage. One has only to hear his music for the “Romeo and Juliet” ballet and the opera, “The Love of Three Oranges” to realize how enduring a hold the theatre had on him.
Emboldened by Taneieff’s reaction, the eleven-year-old boy next showed him a symphony. Prokofieff himself told the story to Olin Downes, who interviewed him in New York in 1919 for the “Boston Post.” Taneieff leafed through the manuscript and said:—“Pretty well, my boy. You are mastering the form rapidly. Of course, you have to develop more interesting harmony. Most of this is tonic, dominant and subdominant [the simplest and most elementary chords in music], but that will come.”
“This,” said Prokofieff to Mr. Downes, “distressed me greatly. I did not wish to do only what others had done. I could not endure the thought of producing only what others had produced. And so I started out, very earnestly, not to imitate, but to find a way of my own. It was very hard, and my courage was severely put to the test in the following years, since I destroyed reams of music, most of which sounded very well, whenever I realized that it was only an echo of some one’s else. This often wounded me deeply.
“Eleven years later I brought a new score to Taneieff, whom I had not been working with for some seasons. You should have seen his face when he looked at the music. ‘But, my dear boy, this is terrible. What do you call this? And why that?’ And so forth. Then I said to him, ‘Master, please remember what you said to me when I brought my G-major symphony. It was only tonic, dominant and subdominant.’