Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev (review)

For a composer of such prodigious gifts, and a man with such a positive outlook on life, it is remarkable how many stools-aesthetic, political, personal-Prokofiev managed to fall between. His unceasing search for success in the field of opera has long been understood in those terms. But his ballets were scarcely less dogged by difficulty, from their earliest collaborative stages, through dubious decisions over design and choreography, to reception dictated by the vagaries of fashion and ideology. With the conspicuous exception of Romeo and Juliet? No, even that cornucopia of inspired tableaux had to fight for acceptance in his homeland.

Yet danceability lies at the very heart of Prokofiev's musical nature. It lends the greater part of his piano music, concertos, and symphonies an irresistible physicality, and it accounts for the fact that his music transcribes so well from one medium to another (since the lines are almost always conceived in terms of their potential to accompany dance). In short, there is probably no more important key to understanding or performing his music.

All the more welcome, then, is a book that takes a searching look at Prokofiev's collaborations with Diaghilev, for whom four of his nine ballets were composed, and without whose input they would have emerged very differently. Not that Prokofiev's musical ideas themselves were ever the problem. But his instincts for plot, pacing, and musical representation were as hit-and-miss as his themes and textures were unerringly well aimed, hitting the bull's-eye only with The Prodigal Son. Stephen D. Press's study offers undemonstrative proof that whatever Diaghilev's faults, the impresario showed remarkable persistence and vision, as well as sound theatrical nous, in his attempts to save Prokofiev from himself, the more so since the Ballets russes and its productions were all the while staggering from crisis to crisis in their desperate aim for the simultaneously moving targets of innovation and audience appeal. Prokofiev, too, for all his reputation for avarice and self-centredness, emerges with credit for tempering his instincts and acting on Diaghilev's wisdom. If only, one might conclude, there had been a Diaghilev on hand to guide some of his operatic projects with comparable firmness.

Balanced judgements founded on painstaking research and pragmatic observation are the main strength of Press's book. The issues of pacing and dramaturgy that he focuses on are not easy of access, since they do not lie on the visible surface of musical scores and are only readable in crude form from other documents. Hardly surprising, then, that they are scarcely addressed in the copious Prokofiev literature. Avoiding the pitfalls of under- or over-theorizing his observations, Press offers an admirable blend of hard information and issue-based analysis, sifting his diverse, multilingual source material into lucid narratives.

Strangely, given his laudable up-to-dateness with the massive Prokofiev diaries, he has not referenced the standard modern biography (David Nice, Prokofiev (New Haven, 2003)), an omission that leads him at least once to claim a primacy in the field that is not his (e.g. when discussing the two versions of Chout). Yet by far the most damaging weakness of the book lies in its expression. How such a welter of singular subjects with plural verbs, misplaced commas and hyphens, free-floating pronouns, misspellings, mixed metaphors, and malapropisms could survive the editing and proofreading stages is a mystery; and Press was in urgent need of a best friend to save him from inaccuracies in French spellings and Russian transliterations. American usage is consistent for the most part, apart from sudden deviations into 'bars' and 'crotchets', and the text is quite an education in colloquialisms. When Press writes that 'Antheil never suffered from a lack of modesty' (p. 234), he presumably means the exact opposite (a lack of self-belief, or an excess of modesty). And I smiled, though I suspect I was not supposed to, at the statement on page 156 that 'Prokofiev...