Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev (review)

From specialists in Russian music to devotees of ballet, most music lovers are acquainted to at least some degree with Sergei Prokofiev's mature ballets of the Soviet period. Masterpieces such as Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella have graced theater playbills and concert programs with welcome regularity, while our piano students have stumbled their way, with varying success, through "The Dance of the Knights." The body of scholarly literature on these works has also been growing steadily. Yet relatively little attention has been paid until recently to Prokofiev's early—pre-Romeo— work in the genre of ballet. Russian scholars may have been prevented from investigating the topic by the ideological trappings of a carefully constructed myth, still relatively intact, about a repentant modernist who did not truly find his voice as a composer until he was back on his native soil. Western researchers, meanwhile, have tended to dismiss the composer's early ballets as ineffectual, "clumsy clones" of Stravinsky's contemporaneous masterpieces. (Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996], 1511.) Consequently, Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev by Stephen D. Press is, shockingly enough, the first book-length study in any language of the composer's early work in ballet. As such, the new volume is a long overdue and much welcomed contribution to Prokofiev scholarship.

Press's work focuses on Prokofiev's three major Western ballets—Chout, Le pas d'acier, and L'enfant prodigue—as well as on his early aborted attempt, Ala i Lolly, known today only in its orchestral reincarnation, the ever popular Scythian Suite. While stylistic analysis constitutes an important part of the content, the volume's main theme is the young composer's complex relationship with the Ballets Russes circle and its charismatic leader, Serge Diaghilev. The author argues that Diaghilev not only brought Prokofiev into the modern ballet universe, thus providing the means of his success in the West, but also—over years of patient guidance—educated his brash but inexperienced compatriot about the intricacies of effective ballet writing. Essentially, Press believes, he made the composer into the master of the genre that we know today. Furthermore, in so doing, the impresario molded Prokofiev's overall compositional style, steering it towards the so-called "new simplicity"—a more consonant, melodious, and "classical" (rather than "neoclassical") style that characterizes the composer's Soviet-era works, starting with Romeo and Juliet.

The book benefits tremendously from its extensive use of primary sources, including press reviews, correspondence, extant sketches of the music, and Prokofiev's newly published diaries that cover the discussed time period and are quoted liberally throughout the volume. These documents, some of which have only recently been made available for study, will broaden the reader's understanding of the composer's life and work. They also do much to enrich and enliven Press's narrative, as is particularly evident from perusing an extensive biographical essay that opens the book. In it, the author discusses Prokofiev's years abroad and his relationship with Diaghilev and his circle, from their first interactions prior to World War I through 1929, the year of the impresario's death. This engaging account uncovers few substantial new facts, but does correct several old misconceptions about Prokofiev's Western career, some of which stem from the composer's own Autobiography penned in the Soviet Union years later. The first chapter thus provides a nice framework for the rest of the volume. I only wish that this monograph-sized opening could be made easier to digest by providing subheadings, especially since all other chapters, some substantially shorter than this one, include them.

Some of the strongest pages in the book concern the shaping of Prokofiev's style of ballet writing through his revision, under Diaghilev's tutelage, of his Ballets Russes scores. Discussions of the revision process...