Out of Stalin's shadow

He is remembered most for his catchy melodies and political conformism. But 50 years after his death, a different Sergei Prokofiev is emerging. James Meek, in Moscow, traces the story of a composer with just one thing in mind: his music
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev Public domain

One evening last week, an hour before curtain, Alexander Titel, director of Moscow's Stanislavsky & Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theatre, was losing it ever so slightly with his large, capering chorus. They were performing a last-minute run-through of the final scene from Sergei Prokofiev's opera, Betrothal in a Monastery. The set was dominated by a grid of windmills, each a metre across. Behind the singers, acrobats tumbled across the stage and two men strode past each other, tossing fish into each other's frying pans.

"If you're here to work, work!" shouts Titel into the huge microphone he holds in both hands in front of him. "If not, thank you, goodbye!"

He leads me backstage, past grinning Harlequins and Columbines, through narrow corridors crowded with prop baskets, clutches of blue papier-mache divers' helmets and fish costumes, and upstairs to his office. It is the day after the Russian Orthodox Christmas, in the coldest winter of the century so far. This night in Moscow, Titel's production of Betrothal is the only one of Prokofiev's works being performed anywhere.

"If we had Rigoletto on, we would've pulled in more folk than you'll see tonight," says Titel. "It's a great shame, because I love this work, and I love Prokofiev."

In the city where he died, 50 years ago this April, on the same day and hour as Joseph Stalin, they do remember Prokofiev, but fitfully, as he is remembered the world over. His best-known melodies - the themes from Peter and the Wolf, the Dance of the Knights from the ballet Romeo and Juliet, the march from his opera The Love for Three Oranges, parts of the score from the film Lieutenant Kije - would make him as recognisable as Mozart or Verdi, if the public could only link the name to the tune.

As Moscow prepares to commemorate the anniversary of his death with concerts and exhibitions, Prokofiev's reputation stands to benefit from an end to the rift, which lasted for much of the 20th century, between the intellectuals who knew the breadth of his work but felt disdain for his crowd-pleasing lyricism, and the mass audiences who saw and heard only his greatest hits. The child genius who composed his first opera in 1900 when he was nine, the travelling young composer-pianist who astounded and outraged critics around the northern hemisphere with his radical early 20th-century works, the rival to Stravinsky in the affections of Sergei Diaghilev and the fashion-obsessed French audiences of the Ballet Russes, the partner of Eisenstein in two of Russia's most remarkable films, the architect of vast spectacles of song for, and under the grip of, Stalin, the author of a catalogue of late, profound, poignant works of chamber music - all these Prokofievs may come to be seen for what they are, the facets of a single, complex man.

"I think we're on the threshold of a renaissance in Prokofiev's reputation," says Naum Kleiman, head of Moscow's Cinema Museum and a brilliant, articulate scholar of the composer's work with Eisenstein on the films Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevsky. "Five years after his death, there was a Prokofiev memorial evening at the Moscow Conservatory where they spoke of his work only in superlatives. After that, his reputation came to be overshadowed somewhat by that of Dmitri Shostakovich. Now it's coming to be understood that Prokofiev and Shostakovich were equally important; that if Shostakovich was Michelangelo, Prokofiev was Leonardo da Vinci."

Titel's jolly, poster-colour production of Betrothal is based on a Russian view of the past that has led to western misunderstanding of Soviet and post-Soviet culture in recent decades. Where western critics have judged Soviet artists politically, according to the extent to which they resisted, criticised or were injured by the communist regime, many Russians cling to the uncomfortable truth that, even in the most evil of dictatorships, it is possible to experience personal joy, love and laughter. Titel's Betrothal is nostalgia for a world of beautiful lies, a reluctance by a certain post-Soviet generation to abandon fond childhood memories just because they nested within Stalin's terror. By associating Prokofiev with that tendency, Titel is endorsing the familiar image of the two titans: the optimistic Prokofiev, who never let the Stalinist horror reach his work, and the wounded, protesting Shostakovich, from whom the Gulag howls with every bar.

"Prokofiev was more characterised by delight in life; Shostakovich had a more tragic view," says Titel. "I think they both understood the full, loathsome wretchedness of the political and ideological system that repressed them. But they weren't members of an underground resistance - they were composers, they were artists. I think that no matter how much talent they put into their work, it cannot be said of either of them that their compositions represented service to the regime. They served their talent."

The idea that Prokofiev never opposed the authorities in his art is, in any case, a myth. His music was central to Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible; indeed, there is a case for calling it Eisenstein and Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible. Eisenstein wrote that he and Prokofiev used to argue about who would go first: would the director edit the film to the composer's music, or the other way round? Ivan was Stalin's historical idol. As he saw it, the Tsar terrorised the country for its own good. In the Eisenstein-Prokofiev vision, however, the Tsar came to be tormented by what he had done. Luckily for Prokofiev, perhaps, Eisenstein died before they could complete their plan to hold a mirror up to the tyrant.

Even the composer's most odious-sounding commissions, like a 1937 cantata celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution that featured musical settings of texts by Stalin, Marx and Lenin, are not what they seem. The music mocks the pompous words with its crude, plodding scales, and speaks of horror rather than triumph. "Fortunately, music cannot be censored as easily as words," says Kleiman.

Prokofiev wrote the cantata for more than 500 performers, including a military band, an accordion ensemble, two choirs and batteries of drums and cymbals. He auditioned it before Stalin's musically illiterate arts committee by banging it out on a piano and singing in his own, unreliable voice. Stunned by the effect, they turned it down. Stalin never got to hear it. Prokofiev's skin was saved again.

One of the abiding mysteries of Prokofiev's life is why he chose to return to Russia in 1935, after almost two decades in the west, just as the full horror of Stalin's rule was becoming apparent. Some sides of his character seem to speak of an open, extrovert figure: his short temper, his self-confidence, his wide circle of acquaintances, his ease on stage as a performer, his penchant for wearing perfume and garish clothes. "One sunny day, I was walking along the Arbat when I saw an unusual individual," recalled the late pianist Svyatoslav Richter. "He had a provocative bearing and went past me like a phenomenon. He wore yellow boots, a checked suit and a red-orange tie. I couldn't help turning round to look. It was Prokofiev."

Yet there is a mist over the inner heart and mind of the man. He devoted his time to his work, reading, chess and his family; he had few close friends; he rarely spoke or wrote about the emotional shocks that punctuated his life: the death of his father and mother, the execution of his friend and collaborator, the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, abandoning his first wife and her subsequent term in a prison camp, the denunciation of and ban on his work in the late Stalin years.

I went to see Marina Nestyeva, the theatre critic and music writer, whose father Izrael wrote the first biography of Prokofiev. She lives in a street whose name translates as Newspaper Lane, in a house built in Soviet times for musicians, the House of Composers.

Nestyeva's view, shared by many, is that Prokofiev shielded his creative life from the cruel extremes of the world beyond; that he may have compromised his life, but never his art. The picture that emerges is of a man with a passion for order and punctuality, who rages at impresarios and producers, and whose obsession with work, encouraged by Christian Science precepts, relate to impatience at the human weaknesses that prevented the wonderful sounds inside his head being heard outside.

"He worked with equal intensity wherever he was: in the compartment of a train or the cabin of a steamer, in a hospital bed or in a forest clearing, in any mood, even when there was neither a piano nor a desk nearby," says Nestyeva. "He wrote down musical ideas as they came into his head on scraps of paper, cigarette packets or the backs of envelopes if he didn't have his notebook handy."

Prokofiev was born in 1891 on a country estate in Ukraine managed by his father. The absentee owner was happy to allow the family to act the part of the squireocracy, and the composer's childhood was a comfortable one. His mother doted on him and encouraged his eager first steps in music. His first piano work was composed aged five. At the age of 13, he was up before the interview board of the St Petersburg Conservatory, carrying two folders of his compositions, including a sheaf of operatic works and a symphony. The board, which included Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, gave him a place.

Prokofiev found himself a boy among men, and subject to bullying. Mstislav Rostropovich once recounted how Prokofiev was forced to carry out a forfeit that involved going up to the legendary Rimsky-Korsakov and asking him if he had ever masturbated. As the other students listened, young Prokofiev approached Rimsky-Korsakov in the corridor and asked: "Excuse me, Nikolai Andreyevich, have you ever practised onanism?" "Of course! What do you think I am, abnormal?" said Rimsky- Korsakov and moved on.

In 1908, aged 17, Prokofiev made his public debut as a composer-pianist in St Petersburg, to acclaim and delight. It was the beginning of a period of almost three decades of travelling the world, one of the early 20th century's megastars, writing dazzling, sometimes self-consciously modernist, often deliberately provocative works - operas like The Love for Three Oranges, premiered in the US; ballets like Chout and the Prodigal Son, performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes - that none the less betrayed his traditionalist sense that music should have a narrative. Settling in Paris in the wake of the Russian revolution with his Spanish wife Lina, he had his portrait painted by Matisse, saw Picasso attend his premieres, hung out with Charlie Chaplin and Fyodor Shalyapin in Biarritz, jammed with Gershwin in his flat, and entertained the visiting poet and admirer Mayakovsky.

Yet something drove him back to Russia, even though he must have known what Stalin was doing. He spoke of missing the homeland. Perhaps he was tired of the endless rows and cancellations, the carping of the critics, the obsession with fashion and the tight budgets of the western music system; tired of competing with Stravinsky for the peculiar honour of top Russian composer in exile. He must have despaired of ever seeing the opera he hoped would be his masterpiece, The Fiery Angel, produced. He wanted respect; he wanted the huge budgets, skilled artists and material privileges the Soviet arts system offered. Just after he moved back to Moscow with his wife and two sons - but when it might not have been too late to change his mind - the notorious Chaos Instead of Music article, denouncing Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, appeared in Pravda. The signs were plain: neither people nor art were safe from the mad butcher of the Kremlin. Prokofiev chose to ignore the signs.

The pianist and Moscow Conservatory teacher Tigran Alikhanov took me to see his mother Slava, a former violinist now in her 80s. She was not only a virtuoso but a Soviet society girl in the 1930s, and a regular at Stalin's New Year parties in the Kremlin; she went not because she liked him but because to refuse would be to invite death. She recalls an idyllic three weeks at a resort in the north Caucasus in 1938, where Prokofiev was staying. In Moscow, people were disappearing every day; in the resorts, the artistic elite took an eat, drink and be merry attitude. "If you weren't arrested, you had to live a full life," says Sava Alikhanova. She recalls Prokofiev as reserved, hard-working and good-humoured, although he flew into a rage with the resort barber after he nicked his ears with a pair of scissors, and demanded he be sacked. The barber demanded he be sent home.

"He loved to dance," adds Alikhanova. "One night the band was playing a waltz and he said, 'Slavochka, let's dance.' I agreed. He was terrible - he kept standing on my feet! I said, 'You're supposed to be the king of rhythm, and you can't follow this? It's one-two-three, one-two-three." She laughs at the memory.

It was about this time Prokofiev agreed to work with Meyerhold on a new opera, Semyon Kotko, and met the writer Maria-Cecilia Mendelson, known as Mira, 24 years his junior, for whom he would leave Lina. In 1940, just before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Prokofiev and Mira worked on Betrothal in a Monastery; he wrote the music, she the libretto. "It was written on a wave of love," says Titel.

Yet it was a terrible, fragile happiness, amid so much horror. Meyerhold, a good friend who had featured in the Prokofiev family's home movies, was arrested on June 20 1939. He would never be seen again. Colleagues, friends and family, who had no notion whether he was alive or dead, could neither say nor do anything. "One of the terrible signs of the age," said Shostakovich, "a man had disappeared but everyone pretended nothing had happened." Not long after the arrest, Meyerhold's wife was murdered in their flat. The 65-year-old Meyerhold was tortured, deprived of sleep and beaten for hours to extract a confession of non-existent crimes before being shot.

Despite the vanishings, Prokofiev went on to have a good war. He enjoyed the love of Mira, of the public and of the regime; he won Stalin prize after Stalin prize, while the first part of the operas War and Peace and Ivan Grozny and various sonatas were well received. Then came 1948. At Stalin's behest, the odious head of the Union of Composers, Tikhon Khrennikov, denounced Prokofiev's works as "formalist", evil and bourgeois. His music was not to be heard in public again until 1950. Shortly after the ban, Lina was arrested. When Prokofiev's death coincided with Stalin's three years later, only a handful of people attended the composer's funeral, carrying not a single flower; the dictator's mourners had bought them all. It was days before there was any room in the papers to mention that, besides an executioner, Russia had lost a genius.

One morning I drove to Klyazma, just outside Moscow, to see another elderly violinist, Olga Vedernikova, widow of late pianist Anatoly Vedernikov, who had worked as the ill Prokofiev's assistant in his final years. Vedernikova maintained that, mentally, the composer managed to keep the horror at arm's length: "The terrible spirit of the times left Shostakovich continually bowed down. We think it affected his mental health in a way. Prokofiev had a different nature, where everything was expected to dissolve away with time. He didn't allow these disappointments to reach him. Of course he endured it all, but he didn't want it to disturb his creative work. He never spoke badly of anyone. Perhaps he was just careful; or perhaps he didn't think they were worth it."

In a memoir written before his death and published last year, her husband painted a poignant picture of the composer's last years, describing him as broken, his music without force, barely able to play piano. Sometimes other young musicians, such as Richter and Rostropovich, would visit, and Prokofiev "sat silent and contented, enjoyment clearly showing on his face. He liked to be among the young. He, the respected maestro, liked to be the centre of attention."

Only once, to his astonishment, was Vedernikov able to draw him out about his inner feelings. The authorities, who had already meddled in the composition of War and Peace to make Marshal Kutuzov more resemble Stalin, told Prokofiev to write music for new words to be inserted into the marshal's aria: "The treacherous enemy has dared to tread on our land." Prokofiev obeyed. Without thinking, Vedernikov asked him how he could bear to alter his finished work at someone else's request. Prokofiev's reply was short and, for a man of such pride in his music, shattering: "I no longer care."

Prokofiev's reluctance to bear witness, in words, to Stalin's terror is an affront to western biographers. It should remind us, with our obsession with biography, that artists do not live so that their lives might be art, but so that their art might live. Listening to Prokofiev's tantalising Visions Fugitives for piano, which seems to promise a disclosure that never quite comes, it is possible to see the great anxious intelligence of the composer's face looking at you from a distance, distracted for a moment, before it turns away to something that, though it is the most important part of any composer's life, no biographer can ever visit: the moment of the making of the music.

Lost in music April 1891 Prokofiev is born on the estate of Sontsovka, Ukraine

February-June 1900 Writes Velijan (The Giant), a three-act opera that is performed to his family

1909 Graduates from St Petersburg Conservatory

1918-22 Lives in the US, but his career in exile is less successful than he hoped

1921 The Love for Three Oranges premieres in Chicago

1922 Moves to Europe

1923 Marries the Spanish singer Lina Llubera

1933 Scores Lieutenant Kije

1936 Returns to Soviet Union. Writes Peter and the Wolf, completes the ballet Romeo and Juliet

1938-9 Scores Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky

1940 Premiere of Semyon Kotko

1942-45 Scores Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible

1941 Germany attacks Soviet Union. Prokofiev is evacuated to the Caucasus. Leaves his first wife for Mira Mendelson

1941-2 Writes first version of War and Peace

February 1948 Acknowledges his alleged artistic errors in a letter read out to the Union of Composers. His first wife Lina is arrested and condemned to 20 years in labour camps. She is released in 1956

March 5 1953 Dies the same hour as Stalin. His death goes almost unnoticed, and there is not one flower at his funeral - Stalin's uses every bloom available

· The Manchester Prokofiev festival runs from January 31 to February 10. Box office: 0161-907 9000. Papa, What If They Hang You for This?: Prokofiev and Shostakovich Under Stalin is at the South Bank, London SE1, from March 7 to 23. Box office: 020-7960 4242.