Russia’s Sergei Prokofiev had been told months ago by the party’s Central Committee how to write music. But had he really listened?
His new opera, performed in Leningrad, seemed patriotic enough at first glance: a Soviet pilot loses both feet in a crash, manages to fly again to prove his devotion to Stalin and the motherland. What more could a composer do? A good deal more, apparently, if he was to satisfy the music-loving Central Committee. Said Culture and Life: Prokofiev’s music for the Tale of a Real Person was “in screaming contradiction with the text . . . hard on the ear and lacking in melody for singing . . . really insulting for a Soviet audience.”
Last week the big guns of the Soviet Composers’ Union boomed into the act. Secretary-General Tikhon Khrennikov pointed out meaningly that both Dmitri
Shostakovich, in his music for the Young Guard (TIME, Oct. 25), and Aram Khachaturian, in his score for a film on Lenin, had managed to “reorganize” themselves. Other composers had begun “to rebuild their work,” although “the process of their reconstruction proceeds slowly.” But Prokofiev’s work still smelled of the “marazm [wasting away] of bourgeois culture.” Said Khrennikov: Prokofiev obviously had not “drawn the necessary conclusions from the decree of the Central Committee . . .”
Two days later, Composer Prokofiev moistened his lips again, respectfully promised to do better.
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