Today, he tells us about the life of Prokofiev (1891-1953) in the form of a novel. He imagined, in fact, that in 1970, a childhood friend of the composer, reached the age of 79, recounts his memories of the musician. Son of a peasant who worked in the vast agricultural field that the Prokofiev engineer managed on behalf of a rich landowner in Ukraine, Igor had been, as a child, the comrade of Sergei games. Having become an adult, he hired him as secretary and confidant. Through his point, which recalls the role of confidants in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, Fernandez can sometimes evoke the success or the privacy of the musician, sometimes distances himself from his behaviors or his works.
Music for an elite
Early reader, notably of the great Ukrainian writer Gogol, raised in a free-fester family but fascinated by the devil, Sergei was 9 years old when his mother brought him to Moscow to make him discover the opera. When he returned to Ukraine, he composed one in three acts! At 13, his father having died, his mother settled with him in Saint Petersburg where he had been admitted to the conservatory. He no longer ceased to compose instrumental works or operas, including 17 years old The player According to the novel by Dostoyevski, which was not created until August 29, 1929… at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, under the direction of Corneil de Thoran and in a French translation of Paul Spaak, the father of a future Belgian Minister for Foreign Affairs!
At the end of 1917, Sergei and his mother were authorized by the new communist power to go to France where artistic modernity was in full swing (Russian ballets of Diaghilev, Stravinski, Picasso, Surrealism, etc.). He composed The love of the three orangeswhich will be created … in Chicago in 1921. His works were applauded by avant-garde audiences …
The fall of the USSR, this colossus with clay feet (podcast)
The choice of workers
This enlightens, according to his confidant Igor, the Prokofiev enigma. Stravinski, glorified by his Spring coronationstayed living in the West: he died in 1971 in New York and was buried at his request in Venice, at the Orthodox cemetery of San Michele Island, next to the tomb of Diaghilev – the day I bowed to her, a slipper had been fresh! For his part, Chostakovitch (1906-1975) never left the USSR despite the advice that the authorities inflicted on him. Prokofiev, he, comfortably installed in Paris, returned to live in 1936 with his wife and his two sons in a Russia devastated by the bloody Stalinist repressions.
By the novelist’s pen, his secretary and friend explains to us that the composer had realized that an abyss had been dug between musical modernity and the “general public” who did not understand anything. His works only liked an audience of snobs and “hypercultivated bourgeois” in search of novelty. From then on, he had explained to his friend, “I opted for the USSR in order to reconcile the masses with contemporary music, in other words, in order to fill the gap between the research work of creators and the absorption capacity of the general public of workers”.
In Russia, Prokofiev lived between the pleasure of writing Pierre and the wolf (1936) For his sons, the happiness of composing the music of the film Alexandre Nevski (1939) of Eisenstein, the forfeiture of inflicting a Ode in Stalin (1939), the humiliation of being vilified in 1947 by the Minister of Culture Jdanov. He died on the same day as Stalin, in March 1953. So his death went unnoticed.
⇒ An impossible choice | Roman | Dominique Fernandez, Grasset, 544 pp., 25 €, digital € 17
EXTRACT
“I went back to the USSR in order to reconcile the masses with contemporary music.”
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