Sergey Prokofiev. Behind the Mask: Diaries 1915-1923. Cornell UP, 2008
Anthony Phillips (Editor); Anthony Phillips (Translator); Anthony
Phillips (Introduction)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4863
About the Author
Anthony Phillips is the translator of Diaries 1907-1914: Prodigious
Youth by Sergey Prokofiev and Story of a Friendship: The Letters of
Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941-1975, also from Cornell.
Phillips has also served as the general manager of the Royal Festival
Hall, London.
"'To go to America!' Here was wretchedness; there life brimming over. .
. . Such was the flag under which I greeted the New Year. Surely it will
not disappoint my hopes?"
With these words Sergey Prokofiev closed his diary for the revolutionary
year 1917. He would not be disappointed by 1918. On August 24, after an
epic trek that carried him across strife-torn Russia to the Pacific and
the breadth of North America, he stepped from a stifling Grand Central
Terminal onto the streets of New York. This marked the beginning of his
exile, which would last-with one brief exception-until 1934.
This second volume of Prokofiev's diary records an astonishing record of
artistic accomplishment against a backdrop of cataclysmic change. The
composer dodges gunfire in Petrograd during the February Revolution, but
as a rule pays attention to political events only as they affect him
personally. Composition and performance are the main concerns, along
with the persistent and ultimately failed struggle to arrange a
performance of his opera The Gambler. As in his Conservatory years, he
also reveals his own aesthetic principles as he reacts to the work of
others, sometimes with dark humor ("bored out of my life" by Mahler's
7th Symphony, "it is like kissing a still-born child.").
The years in America were difficult. Always in the shadow of
Rachmaninoff, he struggled to establish himself as composer and piano
virtuoso. He details the seemingly endless but finally successful battle
with the Chicago Civic Opera to mount Love for the Three Oranges, falls
in love with the young Stella Adler, and begins work on his third opera,
The Fiery Angel.
Two years later he is in Paris, where his music is more warmly received
than in Russia or America. Here the galaxy of connections grows
exponentially as his fame expands. As always, he documents his
encounters with sharp, often sardonic insight. The pages of the diary
teem with the names of the period's most celebrated artists. There are
the Russians Diaghilev, Chaliapin, Kossevitzky, Stravinsky, Mayakovsky
("a fearsome apache"), Meyerhold, and Bakst. But Prokofiev's world now
expands to include Ravel, Szymanowski, Marinetti, Mary Garden, Cocteau,
Artur Rubenstein, and many others.
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