By Stuart Mitchner

A few days ago I listened to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and have been buoyed by the joyous ambiance of this 13 minutes of music ever since. In the colorful image accompanying the piece on YouTube, Prokofiev is lounging on a cane chair surrounded by greenery, one leg casually balanced on the other, one arm slung over the back of the chair, holding a score he’s been working on, a pencil in his other hand. He’s dressed casually in a dark brown zippered jacket, and he’s looking good, touches of color in his cheeks, no glasses, in his thirties or forties, prime of life, and as in other photos from this period (see his wikipedia page), he looks more like a Russian David Bowie than the generic image of the severe, bespectacled composer.

Finding Out More

Hoping to find out more about this music, I drove over to Labyrinth Books and bought Claude Samuel’s Prokofiev (Calder and Boyars 1971). Next I plunged into my email archive and came up with a ten-year-old message from an old college friend telling me he’s been “on a Prokofiev kick” and thinks of him, fondly, as “Rachmaninoff Gone Mad.” After praising “his terrific and terrifically showy, piano music,” my friend says, point blank: “I hate the Classical Symphony.”

Undaunted, and curious to know more about the “terrifically showy” piano music, I consulted Samuel’s book and found that between 1913 and 1917, Prokofiev was “literally devoured by the passion for composition,” completing not only the Classical Symphony but the Visions Fugitives, piano sonatas 3 and 4, and an opera based on Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. Samuel says to keep in mind that the St. Petersburg-based composer “paid hardly any attention” to the outbreak of revolution “during the bloody years of 1916 and 1917.”

As for the symphony, formally Symphony No. 1, Prokofiev’s goal was to compose a score without the piano. According to a quote from his autobiography, he spent the summer of 1917 “reading Kant and working hard, having deliberately left my piano in town.” Here’s Samuel’s account of what happened when the 22-year-old pianist introduced his Piano Concerto No. 2 at Pavlosk, St. Petersburg in September 1913: As “doubts begin to flit across the mind of the astonished public, some express their indignation out loud, some get up and find salvation in retreat. ‘This music is enough to drive one mad!’ says someone.” As the concert ends, the remaining members of the audience are “whistling and shouting.” Calling it “a fiery performance,” the concerto’s conductor declares, “The daring and assurance of the young barbarian captivated and convinced the public.”

Born in the Ukraine

I’d been planning a column on the Bryn Mawr-Wellesley book sale until the unintended consequence of Prokofiev’s symphony, which became more consequential when I learned that the composer had been born in 1891 (“the year of the centenary of Mozart’s death”) in Sontsivka, “a small village situated in the basin of the Donetz” when Ukraine was part of Russia. In Samuel’s words, Prokofiev, “a man of precision,” stated in his memoirs that he “first saw the light of day on Wednesday, 23rd April, at five in the afternoon.” Samuel neglects to point out that the man who composed the ballet Romeo and Juliet shared a birthday with Shakespeare, perhaps because Samuel thought Shakespeare seemed an awkward fit in a chapter titled “A Child of Holy Russia.”

On November 9, 2024, Russian troops entered Sontsivka, and captured it in mid-December.

Three Years Ago

Shortly after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in late February of 2022, I noted that Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was born an easy drive from the razed port city of Mariupol, where hundreds of men, women, and children perished during the bombing of the theater in which his plays were regularly performed. In April 2022, I inserted Dr. Astroff’s speech from the first act of Uncle Vanya into the carnage of Mariupol, as if he were tending to the survivors:

“Such dirt there was, and smoke! Unspeakable! I slaved among those people all day, not a crumb passed my lips, but when I got home there was still no rest for me; a switchman was carried in from the railroad; I laid him on the operating table and he died in my arms under chloroform, and then my feelings that should have been deadened awoke again, my conscience tortured me as if I had killed the man. I sat down and closed my eyes … and thought: will our descendants two hundred years from now … remember to give us a kind word? No, they will forget.”

There’s a photo of Putin from 2003 looking grim and uncomfortable during a visit to the Chekhov house museum in Yalta, where he ignored the plea for funding from a staff that had been witness to the museum’s steady degradation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fifty years before Putin’s visit, Prokofiev and Joseph Stalin died on the same day, March 5, 1953. Since “the child of Mother Russia” lived near Red Square, which was besieged by crowds mourning Stalin, his coffin had to be moved by hand through back streets in the opposite direction of the masses of people going to view Stalin’s body. Stalin was buried in the Kremlin wall, while Prokofiev and Chekhov were buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery.

Sharing Beethoven

By chance not design, March 5 was also the day I encountered Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony. An hour later, also on YouTube, I watched Daniel Barenboim conduct the West-Eastern Divan orchestra in a performance of Beethoven’s Sixth. It was my way of sharing the music with a friend who had offered me tickets to Sunday afternoon’s performance of the Sixth by the Princeton Symphony. Several scheduling conflicts included a Sunday visit to the set up of the Bryn Mawr book sale ahead of the March 12 preview, which I’ll report on an the end of this column.

What struck me a week ago was the way the Beethoven smoothly, instantly, beautifully extended the spirit of the Prokofiev, the same flow, the same sense of the ongoing human story, the ultimate difference being between a poem of youthful word-drunk genius and a novel by a master. An added benefit was watching the orchestra, a fascinating array of close-up views of the musicians sharing in the creation. Back in the day when a 19-year-old version of me was listening to Beethoven and Brahms, Copland and Gershwin, Basie and Sinatra, I never knew the Sixth as well as the Fifth and neither were as close to the movement of my life as Prokofiev’s 13-minute symphony.

The impact of the West-Eastern Divan concert at the 2012 London Proms was intensified by the anniversary of Putin’s invasion and by fresh memories of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s devastating response. Here was an orchestra made up of Hispanic, Palestinian, Israeli, Egyptian, Iranian, Jordanian, and Syrian musicians playing the work of a German composer. According to Barenboim, “the Divan is not a love story, and it is not a peace story.” He conceived it with the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said “as a project against ignorance,” wherein “it is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it.”

The World in Books

Although the orchestra was formed in 1999, as Barenboim points out, the concept dates back to the early 19th century, “Divan” being the Persian word for “collection of poems” and West-Eastern Divan the title which German poet Goethe gave to his 1819 anthology of poems in the Persian style. In my visit to the book sale set-up at the Stuart Country Day School, I didn’t have time to check out the poetry section, but as anyone who has journeyed through that world of books knows, there’s a good chance that Goethe’s anthology will turn up, if only in a reprinted edition.

The sections I surveyed on Sunday were, first, Music, where I was hoping for books on Prokofiev like the formidable Princeton University Press volume Sergey Prokofiev and His World (2008) edited by Princeton professor Simon Morrison, whose biography of Stevie Nicks I reviewed a few years ago. While I found impressive books on Puccini, Debussy, Berg, and inevitably Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and Schubert, I found nothing on Prokofiev. Since there were boxes not yet unpacked, there’s a chance that by the time of Wednesday’s preview, there will books about the composer of The Classical Symphony.

After my usual visit to Collector’s Corner, where the rarest volume I noticed was a first edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, I checked out the overflowing bounty in the Old and Rare section. Books that caught my eye were War On the White Slave Trade (1830); Tik Tok of Oz (1914), a title with ironic 21st century resonance; Watty Piper’s The Bumper Book (1952), and The Chariot Race from Ben Hur (1908), elegantly bound and illustrated. Although I didn’t see it in Collector’s Corner, I should mention the 1894 “Peacock” edition of Pride and Prejudice with its “exquisite gilt cover design, a celebrated example of late Victorian pictorial covers.”

Bowie’s Prokofiev

I mentioned a resemblance between David Bowie and Prokofiev in his thirties, and while it may seem a stretch, check out the photo of the composer on his Wikipedia page, as well as the one on the Wikipedia for David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a recording Bowie made with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1977. For children all over the world, this “symphonic tale” is their first exposure to classical music. As much as I loved the Classical Symphony, I didn’t know it by heart. I can still whistle Peter’s theme.