“His music is predominantly melodious, harmonically and contrapuntally clear, formally organic without being pedantic, original but unforced—in short an expression of the basic principles of classical music.
“Many of the phrases in the Central Committee’s denunciation are fantastically inappropriate to Prokofieff’s art. Prokofieff has never espoused atonality. He is eminently a democratic composer. Peter and the Wolf is loved by children and unspoiled adults the world over. His music for the film Alexander Nevsky and the cantata he later fashioned from it have been enormously popular. His suite Lieutenant Kijé, originally composed for another motion picture, charmed audiences as soon as it was heard, in 1934. On the contrary, among contemporary masters Prokofieff is precisely one whom we can salute as being close to the people, able to write music that is equally appealing to connoisseurs and less demanding listeners, a man who understands the musical character of simple human beings.
“Perhaps the outstanding psychological trait of Prokofieff’s music has been its splendid healthiness. His Classical Symphony of 1916-17 bounds along with exhilarating energy and spontaneity; and in his works of the last decade, 1941-51, such as the ballet, ‘Cinderella’, the String Quartet No. 2, and the Symphony No. 5, we find the same fullness of creative power, the same acceptance of life and ability to find it good and wholesome. Prokofieff belongs to the company of Bach and Handel in this respect—not to that of Scriabin and other composers whose genius had been tinged with neurotic traits and a tendency to cultism.”
Nothing deterred by this unprecedented official spanking, Prokofieff went about his business, which was composing. The demands and necessities of this post-war period of reconstruction in Soviet life drew him deeper and deeper into the orbit of its community culture. A large proportion of his music became markedly topical and “national” in theme and orientation. Yet for all the strictures levelled at his music, and Khrennikoff was to scold him yet once more for “bourgeois formalism”, Prokofieff, in most essentials, followed the unhampered bent of his genius. Ballet music, piano and cello sonatas continued to show that preoccupation with living and exciting form that in the best art can be dictated only by the exigencies of the material. It is possible that towards the very end Prokofieff had found a new synthesis that brought to full flower the abiding lyricism of his nature. That he was now determined to achieve an emotional communication through a lyrical simplicity of idiom about which there could be no mystery or confusion is clear. How much of this was owing to any official effort to discipline him and how much to the inevitable direction of his own creative logic it must remain for later and better informed students to assess.
The Seventh Symphony would seem to be a final testament of Prokofieff’s return to this serene transparency of style. The new symphony was proof conclusive to the editors of “Pravda” that Prokofieff “had taken to heart the criticism directed at his work and succeeded in overcoming the fatal influence of formalism.” Prokofieff was now seeking “to create beautiful, delicate music able to satisfy the artistic tastes of the Soviet people.”
Prokofieff’s death on March 4, 1953, the announcement of which was delayed several days perhaps because of the overshadowing illness and death of Premier Stalin, came with the shock of an irreparable loss to music-lovers everywhere. A chapter of world music in which a strong and fastidious classical sense had combined with a healthy and sometimes startling freshness of novelty, seemed to have closed. Dead at sixty-two, Serge Prokofieff had now begun that second life in the living memorial of the permanent repertory that is both the reward and the legacy of creative genius. It is safe to predict that so long as the concert hall endures as an institution, a considerable portion of his music will have a secure place within its hospitable walls.
The picture of him with his wife and two children was taken when he was living in Paris.