Your invitation to write about Serge Prokofieff to honor his 70th Anniversary for the April issue of Sovietskaya Muzyka is accepted with pleasure, because I admire the music of Prokofieff;
and with sober purpose, because the development of Prokofieff personifies, in many ways, the course of music in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Serge Prokofieff whom we knew in the United States of America was gay, witty, mercurial, full of pranks and bonheur -- and very capable as a professional musician.
These qualities endeared him to both the musicians and the social-economic haute monde which supported the concert world of the post-World War 1, era.
Prokofieff's outlook as a composer-pianist-conductor in America was, indeed, brilliant.

Prokofieff's Classical Symphony was hailed as an ingenious work from a naturally gifted and well-trained musician still in his twenties.
To the Traditionalists, it was a brilliant satire on modernism;
to the Neo-Classicists, it was a challenge to the pre-war world.
What was it to Prokofieff?
A tongue-in-cheek stylization of 18th-Century ideas;
a trial balloon to test the aesthetic climate of the times;
a brilliant piece de resistance?
Certainly its composer was an ascending star on a new world horizon.

I heard the Classical Symphony for the first time when Koussevitzky conducted it in Paris in 1927.
All musical Paris was there.
Some musicians were enthusiastic, some skeptical.
I myself was one of the skeptics (35 years ago).
I remember Ernest Bloch in the foyer, shouting in his high-pitched voice: "it may be a tour de force, mais mon Dieu, can anyone take this music seriously"?

The answer is, "Yes"!
Certainly, America took Prokofieff and his Classical Symphony seriously, and with a good deal of pleasure.
His life-long friend, Serge Koussevitzky, gave unreservedly of his praise and brilliant performances in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.,, to which he added broadcastings and recordings for the whole nation.
Chicago was also a welcome host: there, in 1921, Prokofieff conducted the world premiere of the Love For Three Oranges, and played the first performance of his Third Piano Concerto.
"Uncle Sam" was, indeed, a rich uncle to Prokofieff, in those opulent, post-war victory years of peace and prosperity, bold speculations and extravaganzas, enjoyment and pleasure: "The Golden Twenties".
We attended the premieres of his concertos, symphonies, and suites;
we studied, taught, and performed his piano sonatas, chamber music, gavottes, and marches;
we bought his records and played them in our schools and universities.
We unanimously agreed that Prokofieff had won his rights as a world citizen to the first ranks of Twentieth-Century Composers.

Nevertheless, Prokofieff was much influenced by Paris during the Twenties: the Paris which was the artistic center of the Western World -- the social Paris to which Russian aristocracy migrated -- the chic Paris which attracted the tourist dollars of rich America -- the avant-garde Paris of Diaghileff, Stravinsky, Koussevitzky, Cocteau, Picasso -- the laissez-faire Paris of Dadaism and ultramodern art -- the Paris sympathique which took young composers to her bosom with such quick and easy enthusiasms.

So young Prokofieff was the darling of success: in his motherland;
in the spacious hunting grounds of "Uncle Sam";
in the exciting salons of his lovely, brilliant Paris -- mistress of gaiety -- excess and abandon -- world theatre of new-found freedoms in tone, color, dance, design, and thought.

Meanwhile, three great terrible forces were coagulating and crystallizing.
In this world-wide conscription of men, minds, and machines, Prokofieff was recalled to his native land.
The world exploded when Fascism challenged all concepts of peace and liberty, and the outraged, freedom-loving peoples of the Capitalist and Socialist worlds combined forces to stamp Fascist tyranny into cringing submission.
After this holocaust, a changing world occupied the minds of men;
a world beset with new boundaries, new treaties and governments, new goals and methods, and the age-old fears of aggression and subjugation -- hunger and exposure.

In this changed world, Prokofieff settled to find himself, and to create for large national purpose.
Here, this happy, roving son of good fortune proved that he could accept the disciplines of a new social-economic order fighting for its very existence and ideals in a truculent world.
Here, Prokofieff became a workman in the vineyards of Socialism -- producing music for the masses.

It is at this point in his life that the mature Prokofieff emerges.
One might have expected that such a violent epoch of transition would have destroyed the creative flair of a composer, especially one whose works were so fluent and spontaneous.

But no: Prokofieff grew.
He accepted the environment of his destiny -- took root and grew to fulfill the stature of his early promise.
By 1937 he had clarified his intentions to serve his people: "I have striven for clarity and melodious idiom, but at the same time I have by no means attempted to restrict myself to the accepted methods of harmony and melody.
This is precisely what makes lucid, straightforward music so difficult to compose -- the clarity must be new, not old".
How right he was;
how clearly he saw the cultural defection of experimentation as an escape for those who dare not or prefer not to face the discipline of modern traditionalism.
And with what resource did Prokofieff back up his Credo of words -- with torrents of powerful music.
Compare the vast difference in scope and beauty between his neat and witty little Classical Symphony and his big, muscular, passionate, and eloquent Fifth Symphony;
or the Love For Three Oranges (gay as it is) with the wonderful, imaginative, colorful, and subtle tenderness of the magnificent ballet, The Stone Flower.
This masterpiece has gaiety, too, but it is the gaiety of dancing people: earthy, salty and humorous.

Of course, these works are not comparable, even though the same brain conceived them.
The early works were conceived for a sophisticated, international audience;
the later works were conceived to affirm a way of life for fellow citizens.
However, in all of Prokofieff's music, young or mature, we find his profile -- his "signature" -- his craftsman's attitude.
Prokofieff never forsakes his medium for the cause of experimentation per se.
In orchestration, he stretches the limits of instrumentation with good judgment and a fine imagination for color.
His sense for rhythmic variety and timing is impeccable.
His creative development of melodic designs of Slavic dance tunes and love songs is captivating: witty, clever, adroit, and subtle.
His counterpoint is pertinent, skillful, and rarely thick.

Also, it should be noted that the polytonal freedom of his melodies and harmonic modulations, the brilliant orchestrations, the adroitness for evading the heaviness of figured bass, the skill in florid counterpoint were not lost in his mature output, even in the spectacular historical dramas of the stage and cinema, where a large, dramatic canvas of sound was required.
That Prokofieff's harmonies and forms sometimes seem professionally routine to our ears, may or may not indicate that he was less of an "original" than we prefer to believe.
Need for novelty may be a symptom of cultural fatigue and instability.

Prokofieff might well emerge as a cultural hero, who, by the force of his creative life, helped preserve the main stream of tradition, to which the surviving idioms of current experimentalism may be eventually added and integrated.

At this date, it seems probable that the name of Serge Prokofieff will appear in the archives of History, as an effective Traditionalist, who was fully aware of the lure and danger of experimentation, and used it as it served his purpose;
yet was never caught up in it -- never a slave to its academic dialectics.
Certainly, it is the traditional clarity of his music which has endeared him to the Western World -- not his experimentations.

So Prokofieff was able to cultivate his musical talents and harvest a rich reward from them.
Nor can anyone be certain that Prokofieff would have done better, or even as well, under different circumstances.
His fellow-countryman, Igor Stravinsky, certainly did not.
Why did Prokofieff expand in stature and fecundity, while Stravinsky (who leaped into fame like a young giant) dwindled in stature and fruitfulness?
I think the answer is to be found in Prokofieff's own words: "the clarity must be new, not old".
When Prokofieff forged his new clarity of "lucid, straightforward music, so difficult to compose", he shaped his talents to his purpose.

When Stravinsky shaped his purpose to the shifting scenes of many cultures, many salons, many dialectics, many personalities, he tried to refashion himself into a stylist of many styles, determined by many disparate cultures.
Prokofieff was guided in a consistent direction by the life of his own people -- by the compass of their national ideas.
But Stravinsky was swayed by the attitudes of whatever culture he was reflecting.
In all his miscalculations, Stravinsky made the fatal historical blunder of presuming that he could transform other composers' inspirations -- representing many peoples, time periods and styles -- into his own music by warping the harmony, melody, or form, to verify his own experiments.
Because of the authentic homogeneity of his early Nationalistic materials, and his flair for orchestrations -- his brilliant Petruchka, his savage Sacre Du Printemps, his incisive Les Noces -- the world kept hoping that he could recapture the historical direction for which his native talents were predisposed.

But time is running out, and many of Stravinsky's admirers begin to fear that he will never find terra firma.
His various aesthetic postulates remain as landmarks of a house divided against itself: Supra-Expressionism, Neo-Paganism, Neo-Classicism, Neo-Romanticism, Neo-Jazz, Neo-Ecclesiasticism, Neo-Popularism, and most recently, Post-Serialism -- all competing with each other within one composer!
What a patchwork of proclamations and renunciations!
Meager and shabby by-products linger to haunt our memories of a once mighty protagonist;
a maladroit reharmonization of our National Anthem (The Star-Spangled Banner);
a poor attempt to write an idiomatic jazz concerto;
a circus polka for elephants;
his hopes that the tunes from his old music might be used for popular American commercial songs!
Stravinsky, nearing the age of eighty, is like a lost and frantic bird, flitting from one abandoned nest to another, searching for a home.

How differently Prokofieff's life unfolded.
Prokofieff was able to adjust his creative personality to a swiftly changing world without losing his particular force and direction.
In the process, his native endowments were stretched, strengthened and disciplined to serve their human purpose.

With a large and circumspect 20th-Century technique, he wove the materials of national heroes and events, national folklore and children's fairy tales -- Slavic dances and love songs -- into a solid musical literature which served his people well, and is providing much enjoyment to the World at large.

Of course, it must not be forgotten that in achieving this historical feat, Prokofieff had the vast resources of his people behind him;
time and economic security;
symphony orchestras, opera and ballet companies;
choruses, chamber music ensembles;
soloists;
recordings;
broadcastings;
television;
large and eager audiences.
It must be conceded that his native land provided Prokofieff with many of the necessary conditions for great creative incentive: economic security and cultural opportunities, incisive idioms, social fermentations for a new national ideology -- a sympathetic public and a large body of performers especially trained to fulfill his purpose.

Thus in Prokofieff the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics produced one of the great composers of the Twentieth Century.
That his moods, even in his early years, are those of his people, does him honor, as his music honors those who inspired it.
That he mastered every aspect of his medium according to his own great talents and contemporary judgments, is a good and solid symbol of his people under the tremendous pressures of proclaiming and practising the rigors of a new culture;
and perhaps of even greater significance -- his music is strong 20th-Century evidence of the effectiveness of Evolution, based on a broad Traditionalism for the creative art of music.

April 10 marked a memorable date in New York's musical history -- indeed in the musical history of the entire eastern United States.
On that date the Musicians Emergency Fund, organized to furnish employment for musicians unable to obtain engagements during the depression and to provide relief for older musicians who lost their fortunes in the stock market crash, observed its 30th anniversary.