Chapter One SERYOZHENKA It was the devil's doing that I was born in Russia with intelligence and talent. --Alexander Pushkin To Prokofiev, childhood was a state of mind. Long after his own idyllic boyhood, he continued to love children for their unfettered imagination, sense of play and inability to dissimulate. That he never forgot what it meant to be a child, and how children think, is evident in the playful but never condescending music he wrote for them, most of all in the phenomenally successful Peter and the Wolf , written when Prokofiev was a boy of forty-five. So much did Prokofiev enjoy childhood--both personally and aesthetically--that he devoted a six-hundred-page "autobiography," by far his largest literary attempt, solely to his first eighteen years. Here, in an offhand, tongue-in-cheek style, he examines his early education, adventures and music in rich and microscopic detail. Like many remembrances of childhood recorded in adulthood, Prokofiev's autobiography is romanticized and idealized; there are few rainy days and even fewer scraped knees. Such unambiguously cheerful memories inevitably arouse suspicion: why does the author need to believe that his childhood was so happy? What darker memories lie repressed below? It is only fair to note, however, that Prokofiev was always an incurable optimist, even under the most difficult circumstances. More than most people, he simply forgot the bad things. The first part of the volume ("Childhood") was written between 1937 and 1939, and the second part ("The Conservatory") between 1945 and 1950. These were difficult times in the composer's life. No doubt he was tempted to escape insoluble adult problems--a broken marriage, war, failing health, the arrest and imprisonment of friends, bureaucratic interference in his music--in a lost childhood paradise. But Prokofiev's playmates, relatives and teachers for the most part corroborate his description of a sunny and entertaining childhood, virtually free of obstacles to the happy unfolding of his musical talent. No tales here of childhood frustration and anger later avenged by artistic fame. His happy memories are very different, for example, from those of Igor Stravinsky, nine years Prokofiev's senior, who recalls his Russian childhood mainly as a time of tyranny, constraints and loneliness. Spoiled wholeheartedly by doting parents, Prokofiev accepted loving indulgence as reality. Later, he came to expect it from everyone. Prokofiev had the good fortune to be born to parents who desperately wanted a baby. Ecstatic when he came into the world on April 11 (April 23, New Style), 1891, they called him Sergei, after his father, Sergei Alekseevich Prokofiev, who was already nearly forty-five. His mother, Maria Grigorevna Zhitkova Prokofiev, was thirty-four and had already borne two children--both daughters--who died in infancy. She had been waiting for a child to fuss over and educate, a companion in the remote Ukrainian village where her husband, an agronomist, managed an aristocrat's estate. When Sergei Sergeevich was born, the village was called Sontsovka, after the family that owned the estate; after the 1917 Revolution it was renamed Krasnoye--red--for the favorite color of the new owners. Prokofiev's parents came to Sontsovka in 1878, only a year after they were married. Thirteen long years went by before Seryozhenka was born. Photographs show that he inherited his mother's face: long and oval-shaped, with thick protruding lips, a wide chin and deep-set sky-blue eyes. His hair was white-blond and straight. From his mother, too, at least in part, came his musical inclinations. She was a serious amateur pianist, and would practice up to six hours a day while pregnant with Sergei Sergeevich, attempting to maintain a link to the cultured urban life she had led before marriage. When her only child, still a toddler, revealed an instinctive love for the instrument, she was understandably pleased. There is a bit of the Cinderella story in the history of his parents' courtship. Maria Grigorevna was descended from a family of serfs. Before the emancipation of 1861, her father served in the Petersburg household of the Sheremetevs, one of Tsarist Russia's richest families. After the emancipation, he worked first as a free servant in the Winter Palace, the royal residence, and later as a scrivener. The life of the Zhitkovo family was impoverished, unstable and marked by tragedy--including the suicide of one of Maria's four teenage sisters. Despite the difficulties, she demonstrated impressive energy and independence, taking aggressive advantage of the new educational opportunities for women and nonaristocrats. She attended high school in Moscow, where she met students from better social and economic backgrounds. (Maria always tended to think of herself, though, as a Petersburger rather than a Muscovite and preferred the capital's more Western cultural atmosphere.) Among her new friends were the daughters of Nadezhda Smirnova, Sergei Alekseevich Prokofiev's sister. Soon, she was spending a good deal of time at their house, where Sergei Alekseevich, uncle to Maria's new girlfriends, had also been living since his own parents' death from cholera when he was fourteen. Ten years older than she, and a student at an agricultural academy, Sergei Alekseevich at first seemed to Maria a dry and forbidding character. Descended from a family of merchants and factory owners, he appeared to have a solid future ahead of him. He studied seriously and even single-mindedly, for the most part ignoring the tumultuous political events shaking Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. (Perhaps it was from his father that Sergei Sergeevich inherited his own indifference to politics, an attitude which would hurt him later on.) In the early 1870s, when student terrorist organizations proliferated wildly, threatening bombings and assassinations, Sergei Alekseevich was once asked to denounce his fellow students who were participating in the uprisings. He refused, and was punished by having his diploma withheld. Forever after, he pointedly avoided political involvement--and even political conversation--of any kind. By the time Sergei Alekseevich graduated, bought a small estate in the Smolensk district and went off to make his farming fortune, he and Maria Grigorevna had become very important to each other. The thought that he might throw himself away on the lively but penniless daughter of peasants alarmed Sergei Alekseevich's relatives, who did nothing to encourage the relationship. But Maria's knowledge and wit, her sociability and energy appealed to Sergei Alekseevich, an intelligent but reserved person. In most ways his opposite, she did not hesitate to tease him for his excessive gravity. Prokofiev--whose relationship with his mother was always exceptionally close--emphasizes in his autobiography that in spite of their economic-social pretensions, his father's family was in fact less refined and intellectually developed than his mother's, which had worked hard for its advancement. And in their future married life, too, Maria would most often take the lead in matters intellectual and cultural; Sergei Alekseevich remained in the background--a dutiful, aloof and somewhat colorless patriarch. Marrying Maria Grigorevna was the most rebellious act of his life. Soon after their wedding in 1877, Sergei Alekseevich and Maria Grigorevna went to live on their land in the Smolensk district, deep in the Russian provinces southwest of Moscow. Life there was hard. Capital to buy farm machinery and construct buildings was what Sergei Alekseevich needed, but most of the money he had inherited from his parents had been lost in an investment scheme with a friend who had disappeared in China. Scrambling to make ends meet, the newly married couple was tempted by an interesting proposal from an old university friend. Dmitri Dmitrievich Sontsov owned two estates: he lived on one, but the other, far to the south in the fertile Ukraine, was run by an inefficient manager who never sent profits. Would Prokofiev, a trained agronomist who could put the place in order, be interested in taking over the manager's job at a higher salary? After long deliberation--and further financial difficulties--Sergei Alekseevich and Maria Grigorevna agreed to the offer. The owner promised that Prokofiev could run Sontsovka as if it were his own property. In the spring of 1878, they made the journey to Sontsovka, having agreed on a trial period of three years, and remained until Sergei Alekseevich's death thirty-two years later. Prokofiev spent his first thirteen years in Sontsovka, and school vacations there until he was eighteen. Sontsovka was remote from civilization; the nearest railroad station, on a rural branch line, was twenty-five miles away. Kiev and Kharkov and Odessa, the large cities of the Ukraine, were hundreds of miles distant, across the flat steppe stretching toward the Black Sea. To reach Moscow and St. Petersburg took days. Educated neighbors were few and far between. Because Sergei Alekseevich was in complete charge of the Sontsovka estate, and Sontsov himself rarely visited, the Prokofievs were to some extent treated like local gentry. They lived in the manor house, a modest but comfortable one-story structure, and had servants who called Maria Grigorevna "Barynya"--"Mistress." After Sergei Sergeevich was born, the peasant boys he played with thought of him as a nobleman's son. And yet Sergei Alekseevich was accountable to Sontsov, and had to send monthly financial statements. Therefore the family found itself in the somewhat unusual--and not always comfortable--position of living like nobility while being constantly reminded that they were less than noble. Some of the neighbors, nobility by blood, treated the Prokofievs condescendingly, even when their estates were smaller and less productive. Snobbish and clannish, the Russian aristocrats regarded even prosperous merchant families like Sergei Alekseevich's as crude and unrefined, almost indistinguishable on the social scale from the peasants. His family's ambiguous social position influenced the composer's later dealings with members of the Russian aristocracy, and with those who cultivated aristocratic pretensions--the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, for example. Aware of how hard his father worked to make a living from Sontsov's estate and how disappointed he must have been that he could not devote his efforts to his own property, Prokofiev always resented those who did not have to earn a living. Like his mother, he placed his faith in discipline, hard work and intellect--not in social class or possessions. Nor did Prokofiev inherit his father's belief that the wealthy had a social and moral responsibility to improve the lot of the less fortunate. In his own political views--as in most things--the composer took after his mother, and remained all his life suspicious of grand philanthropic gestures. Before giving birth to Sergei Sergeevich, a healthy and rosy-checked baby, Maria Grigorevna had spent her time helping out at the local school, dispensing medicine to the sick, and playing the piano. "She had little musical talent," her son wrote many years later; "she acquired technique with difficulty, and her fingers had no cushion of soft skin in front of the fingernails. She was afraid to play in front of people. She did, however, have three virtues: stubbornness, passion and good taste. Mother achieved the best possible performance of the pieces she studied, regarding this work with love, and she was interested in serious music only. This played a significant role in the evolution of my own musical taste: from birth I heard Beethoven and Chopin, and I remember, at the age of twelve, consciously despising light music." Even with the diversion music provided, though, Maria Grigorevna often felt isolated in Sontsovka. Every winter she would escape to spend a few months with friends and family in St. Petersburg, feasting hungrily on intellectual conversation and cultural life. When her son was a little older, she would bring him along. As usually happened on Russian estates far from urban centers, Seryozha's early education occurred entirely in the home. Maria Grigorevna was the single most important force in his intellectual and musical life until she died in 1924. Only his innate sense of independence and mischief saved Prokofiev from becoming a "mama's boy." As an only child, he was the center of attention, receiving not only his mother's affection, but that of servants, nursemaids and, later, tutors hired for his benefit. Maria Grigorevna did try to provide him with a balanced and relatively disciplined upbringing, and relied on her husband's spartan severity to offset her indulgent nature. Prokofiev and his father, who shows up surprisingly infrequently in his son's autobiography, had a distant relationship; neither was comfortable with emotional display. Prokofiev is known as a Wunderkind , a reputation only partially deserved. It was only when he entered the Conservatory, at age thirteen, that he began to demonstrate his exceptional natural gifts to their full extent. As a baby he was intelligent, but not remarkably so. He did not compose symphonies before learning to walk. He did not even learn to play the piano until he was almost six, and did not master it in any significant sense until his adolescent years. But an acute sensitivity to and love for music did appear very early; he would sit quietly listening to his mother practice the piano even before he could speak. Exceptional, too, was his natural musical ear, which could identify fragments of music his mother played before he was six. Even before he had any clear understanding of notation, he wrote "pieces," and was fascinated with the concept of creating signs on a page that translated into sounds from a piano. Throwing his hands left and right on the keyboard, in imitation of his mother, he would sit at the piano and improvise. Luckily, Maria Grigorevna never forced her son to study the piano. An instinctive pedagogue, she believed that the essential element at the beginning level was to develop love for and curiosity about the instrument. When he began to "compose" little pieces on notebook paper in a childish scrawl, and then ask her to play them, she yielded to his insistence to teach him about notation. With her help he wrote down his first composition, "Indian Gallop," inspired by newspaper stories about famine in India. Regular music lessons with his mother began at age seven. At first limited strictly to twenty minutes so as not to bore him, the lessons in elementary theory and piano were gradually extended to thirty minutes, and finally, at age nine, to an hour. By the time he was eight, Seryozhenka (as he was called as a child, later abbreviated to Seryozha) had composed several marches (three for four hands), plus waltzes, a polka and a rondo. Always the doting mother, Maria Grigorevna loved to show him off to relatives and friends, who, of course, were charmed. Never shy, he would oblige by performing his own pieces and the classics. By age nine he could play easy Beethoven sonatas and pieces by Mozart. Mozart's parents wanted to create a musical professional, but Prokofiev's, at least initially, were intent on raising a well-rounded and "normal" boy. His father insisted on supervising rigorous study of academic subjects (with heavy concentration on mathematics and the sciences), perhaps preparing him for an engineer's career, and allowed him to play outside with the peasant boys. Bossy and used to getting his own way, Seryozhenka enjoyed commanding them to play roles in games he invented. Chess was also discovered early, by age seven, and it soon became--after music--his favorite pastime. Fascinated by the clear logic, the straight lines, the charts of moves, the mathematical problem-solving challenge, Prokofiev soon learned the rules and taught his companions--and the maid--how to play. Competition never intimidated him, even as a boy, and he always played to win. With his slender and delicate build he was less gifted for more physical pastimes, and the peasant boys were instructed not to play too roughly with him. Although he grew up in the country, he never worked in the fields and could not tell rye from barley. Flowers were more interesting to him; he would make long lists of their exotic Latin names. To celebrate the new century, a century that would change the Russia into which their son had been born beyond their wildest imaginings, Prokofiev's parents took him to Moscow for the first time in January 1900. Sergei Alekseevich's sister still lived there, along with her daughters, Maria Grigorevna's former girlfriends. Seryozhenka was in a state of almost uncontrollable excitement at the prospect of traveling to Moscow by train; he studied train schedules, routes and equipment with a conductor's passion that lasted his entire life. Soon after they arrived in Moscow, then a chaotic mix of the rustic and the sophisticated, a lively city of burgeoning economic opportunity and industrial fortunes of fairy-tale proportions, the eight-year-old country cousin went to the theatre for the first time. It was love at first sight. He saw two operas--Gounod's Faust and Borodin's Prince Igor --and, at the Bolshoi Theater, one ballet--Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty . Of the three performances, it was, not surprisingly, the mephistophelean mysteries of Faust that most stimulated his imagination. As he recalled in his autobiography, They started playing the overture, and the curtain rose. There were books--lots of books--and Faust with a beard. He's reading from a thick volume and singing something, then he reads and sings again. But when does the devil come on? How slow it all is. Ah--there he is at last! But why is he dressed in a red suit, with a sword--why so fashionable? I thought somehow that the devil would be black, like a Negro, half-naked and maybe even with hooves. Later, when they began amusing themselves, I immediately recognized both the march and the waltz, which I had heard my mother play in Sontsovka. Back in Sontsovka and still under the spell of his night at the opera, Seryozhenka announced that he was going to compose one himself. By early summer he had finished the first act of The Giant , for which he wrote both libretto (in verse) and music, using characters inspired by his loyal Sontsovka playmates. In Act I, the heroine, Ustinya (Stenya), is sitting in the forest reading a book. A giant appears and tries to catch her, but Sergeev (the composer's alter-ego) and Egorov (his friend Egor) enter and scare the beast away as Ustinya falls into a faint. Leaving, the heroes thoughtfully drop their calling cards so she will know who has saved her. The next day, the giant reappears and eats Ustinya's lunch while she is away at the post office. Something must be done, the indignant protagonists decide. They tell the king about the giant and, receiving his royal blessing, engage the giant in combat in the forest, forcing him to flee. Egor is wounded. Act III begins conventionally, with a celebration at Ustinya's house, but concludes unexpectedly with the king's suicide, which causes the characters to grieve only briefly before breaking into triumphant song: "All hail our giant!" Seryozhenka's father saw incipient revolutionary sentiments in the strange political twist at the end, and tried to convince him to rewrite it with a scene of reconciliation between the giant and the king. To the composer's credit, he refused to yield to the censor. A piece of juvenilia never intended to be taken too seriously, The Giant nonetheless shows that at the age of nine, Prokofiev was already able to conceive of a composition as an artistic whole and to complete it with imagination, originality and a sense of style. Musical tricks he had learned from Faust , and from his lessons with his mother, found their way into the score, which breathes the same satirical spirit as his mature opera Love for Three Oranges . In Oranges , too, royal characters act in quirky fashion--the hero is an incurably hypochondriacal prince who can be cured only through laughter--and absurd touches of concrete reality (like the dropped calling cards) rub shoulders with the fantastic. Highly rhythmic waltzes and marches abound in The Giant ; the few operas with which Seryozhenka was familiar at the time-- Faust, Eugene Onegin , perhaps Aida and Meyerbeer's The Prophet --had them, too. Like most children, Prokofiev loved fairy tales. What was unusual about him was that he very early began to see them in a theatrical--and sardonic--light. By the time Prokofiev composed The Giant , besides The Sleeping Beauty , he may have known of Tchaikovsky's other ballets ( Swan Lake and The Nutcracker were performed in the capitals while Seryozhenka was growing up) and of Rimsky-Korsakov's many fairy-tale operas, which he would soon come to cherish: The Snow Maiden, May Night, Sadko . But if Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov viewed fairy tales with a sweet childlike innocence, Prokofiev--even as a boy--regarded them with a caustic irreverence. Despite its unromantic spirit, The Giant did not suffer for lack of praise and attention from family and friends. Seryozhenka's mother helped him with the musical notation, his tutor Louise (whom Maria had lured to Sontsovka from Paris) copied the score over neatly, and his sentimental Aunt Tanya, his mother's sister, to whom The Giant was dedicated, had the manuscript lavishly bound in red with gold lettering: " The Giant : an opera in three acts, a composition by Seryozhenka Prokofiev." A year later, in summer 1901, on a visit to his aunt's country house, Prokofiev directed a domestic production. Aunt Tanya was cast as the Giant (if only for reasons of size), cousin Katya as Ustinya, cousin Shurik as Egorov, and Prokofiev as Sergeev. So intense was her son's excitement and anticipation over the impending performance that Maria Grigorevna feared he would fall ill. But the papered audience of relatives and friends was charmed with the piece, and praised its creator as the next Glinka. Such overwhelmingly positive early experiences as a performer help to explain why Prokofiev seemed to love being onstage for most of his adult life. (Continues...) Excerpted from SERGEI PROKOFIEV by Harlow Robinson. Copyright © 1987 by Harlow Robinson. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
