Prokofiev's Soviet Operas by Nathan Seinen (review)

Sergey Prokofiev dedicated considerable time and creative energy to the composition of opera. An avid reader and lover of literature, the composer revered opera above all other genres, contributing twelve works (eight mature) over the course of his career, with opera projects extending from his childhood to the final years of his life. In part, it was his love for opera that motivated Prokofiev to return to the Soviet Union in 1936. The Stalinist state's sponsorship of opera and the prospect of a flourishing opera career appealed to him greatly. Unfortunately, the composer's plans did not work out as he had anticipated. Indeed, his status as a seasoned opera composer frequently served as an obstacle for him as he began work in a vastly different Russia from the one he had left nearly twenty years earlier. Nevertheless, Prokofiev completed four operas during his years as a repatriated Soviet composer—Semyon Kotko (Semën Kotko; 1939), Betrothal in a Monastery (Obruchenie v monastyre; 1940/43), War and Peace (Voĭna i mir; 1941–52), and The Story of a Real Man (Povest' o nastoi͡ashchem cheloveke; 1947–48).

In Prokofiev's Soviet Operas, Nathan Seinen sets out to examine Prokofiev's four Soviet operas in a multitude of different contexts using a wide variety of resources, including score manuscripts, draft materials for each opera, and the composer's various notebooks as well as a number of Russian-language sources from disciplines such as film studies, history, literary criticism, and sociology. Seinen explores the works from their inception through their critical reception, with particular emphasis on understanding their individual ideological contexts and to "place them in within the wider frame of Soviet cultural history" (p. 4). What emerges is an assessment of Prokofiev's struggle for creative autonomy at a time when collaboration was promoted as an essential component of the creative process and frequently placed the composer in conflict with the demands of socialist realism as espoused by the State Committee on the Arts (forerunner of the Ministry of Culture). Ultimately, Seinen argues that "with all the pressures that were applied to opera composition under Stalin, it is remarkable how 'un-Soviet' all four of Prokofiev's late operas actually are" (p. 18). Undeniably, Prokofiev's efforts to compose operas that would appeal to international audiences served as a major obstacle to his success as a Soviet opera composer who was expected first and foremost to serve the state.

Throughout the text, Seinen examines each work individually, emphasizing their role as independent cultural artifacts. As such, each chapter serves not only as a chronicle of its respective opera but also as a case study of Prokofiev's developing identity as a Soviet composer, the ever-evolving demands of socialist realism, and the complexities of high and late Stalinist aesthetics. Each work is revealed to be malapropos when considered against the expectations of Soviet aesthetics. In selecting the source for his first Soviet opera, for example, Prokofiev chose to set Valentin Kataev's I, Son of the Working People (͡IA, syn trudovogo naroda; 1937), which explored its Soviet subject matter through its setting in Bolshevik Ukraine during a period of German occupation. The novella had been reprinted multiple times and had been adapted twice for the stage as well as for film. Thus, Kataev's story seemed an ideal choice and to be an assured success. Nevertheless, Prokofiev's emphasis on action over affect, focus on the individual rather than the collective, and over-engagement with the humor of Kataev's story rendered the opera inappropriate in the eyes of critics and opened the opera to comparison by the Committee on Arts Affairs with Tikhon Khrennikov's Into the Storm (V buri͡u; 1939), which ultimately received the Party's (and Stalin's) official endorsement over Prokofiev's opera.

Seinen's study also provides exciting new ways of understanding...