Sergei Prokofiev composed four operas as a citizen of Stalinist Russia. The first of them, Semyon Kotko (1939), concerns a World War I veteran released from duty after the 1917 Revolution. He returns to his village to defend it against anti-Bolshevik elements, including an embittered former kulak in cahoots with German invaders. The fourth opera, A Story of a Real Man (1948), is based on a true story. Shot down behind Nazi lines and gravely injured, fighter pilot Aleksei Mares΄ev struggles to survive for eighteen days before being discovered by a group of Russian villagers. Transported to a hospital, he learns that his lower legs have to be amputated. He survives and flies again.
In between, Prokofiev composed a comic opera on a text adapted from Richard Brinsley Sheridan called Betrothal in a Monastery (1940–41), a buffa delight—Prokofiev's version of Wolgang Amadeus Mozart's Così fan tutte. To hear it is to love it. His third and best-known Soviet opera is War and Peace (1943–52), after Lev Tolstoi. Ballroom and battlefield scenes merge; the distorted rhythms of Prokofiev's dance music represent individual fates on one hand, the historical necessities that drive the state on the other. The anempathetic oom-pah-pah of the waltz dominates.
Kotko and Real Man are propagandistic through and through. For most Russian listeners, their verbal content is unpalatable, even laughable, but their music, despite being bound up with the texts, remains appealing. Nathan Seinen sums up the creation and reception of all four operas in a provocative statement: Prokofiev, he argues, “refused to turn his art into a vehicle for propaganda” (224). His defense of this notion rests on the detached nature of Prokofiev's style and on the claim, taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that forces on high might determine the course of things, but the creative soul remains ever free.
As for matters of style, in his Soviet operas, as in those composed in the United States, France, and Germany, Prokofiev relied on declamation more than full-blown aria and choral singing, retaining an affection for ostinato and short melodic motifs to weave his operas together. He was allergic to the stand-and-sing approach taken by lesser-gifted composers like Tikhon Khrennikov and never built a “hit” song into his operas—despite possessing a melodic gift without peer in his generation.
Seinen contends that Prokofiev was disinclined to compose to order, to tailor his sound to the strictures of Socialist Realism. He cared too much about individual psychology and idiosyncratic character portrayals to fashion the stirringly patriotic productions demanded of the Stalinist regime during and after the second world war. Before the war, the emphasis was on popular appeal, characters who laugh and cry in tuneful fashions rather than being bio-mechanically abstract. (Stalin hated the formalism of the 1920s.)
Thus Seinen firmly favors of the original version of War and Peace over the patriotic bombast of the fifth and final version, believing it closest to the source Tolstoi novel. (Caryl Emerson has argued the opposite, not unconvincingly.) The first stresses the microcosm of individual fates over the macrocosm of Russian/Soviet socio-political predestination—as the censors demanded. The ballroom dances and the huge aria for Mikhail Kutuzov came later, as did the boring scene of him hashing out battle tactics with his generals. Prokofiev's last opera, Real Man, also focuses on individual psychology (Seinen mulls a Freudian connection). Prokofiev was expected to extol the selflessness of the New Soviet Man and end things grandly. When he demurred, the opera was shelved. Real Man is a hodgepodge, a “monological epic” (174) that explores trauma (Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung is a point of comparison) before breaking into Estrada.
Context matters too, of course, and here Prokofiev suffered from bad timing: Kotko was premiered just after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; suddenly an opera that depicted Germans as enemies was taboo. Betrothal, too, was out of sync with the times. Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler's three-pronged attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, put an end to light-hearted entertainment.
Seinen's musical discussions are accessible, and he provides more cultural context for some operas than others. The Gogolian, “Evenings in Little Russia” village banter in Semyon Kotko is fascinating to consider in the Stalinist context, so too the Mozartian and Rossinian imprint on Betrothal. (The obvious connections to Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss are puzzlingly ignored.)
That Prokofiev had difficulties placing his “tekhnika in the service of politika” (5) is beyond dispute. His haughtiness caused resentment. Seinen believes Prokofiev “failed as a Soviet subject” (19), which I suppose means that his chief rival, Dmitri Shostakovich, succeeded. Then again, Shostakovich gave up on opera, while Prokofiev stubbornly, even heroically, stuck with it.
