Diaries 1907–1914: Prodigious Youth - Hardcover

Prokofiev, Sergey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080144540X ISBN 13: 9780801445408

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.

Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. In candid and lively prose, he records the all-too-normal preoccupations of a young man making his way in the brilliant social and artistic circles of the prewar Russian capital. Virtually every artist and musician of note appears in these pages, in penetrating and not always flattering vignettes. Prokofiev's main subject, however, is music, its creation and its performance. He reveals his own developing aesthetic principles through his assessments of the works of others, even as he composes such early masterpieces as the First and Second Piano Concertos, The Ugly Duckling, the First Violin Concerto, and the Classical Symphony.

An inexhaustibly rich portrait of a vibrant artistic culture on the edge of war and revolution, Prokofiev's Diaries are both a dramatic illumination of a great composer's creativity and an indispensable contribution to our understanding of musical modernism. They constitute an essential and entertaining reference for all lovers of Prokofiev's music.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"It was my good fortune to have been a close acquaintance of the genius Sergey Prokofiev. Before coming to know him personally I knew many of his works and admired him without reservation as a composer, but after 1948 and until his death we met very frequently indeed. He was a man of unique character: candid, possessed of an exceptionally penetrating wit and deeply held convictions. The publication of his Diaries, first in Russian and now in English, is a great event. We must be grateful to those who have made this possible and who have thereby revealed to us the life of one of the greatest composers and men of the twentieth century."-Mstislav Rostropovich

About the Author:

Anthony Phillips is the translator of Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941-1975, also from Cornell.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 080144540X
• ISBN 13: 9780801445408
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 800
• Editor: Phillips Anthony