"My mother loved music, and my father respected it. No doubt he, too, loved it, but on a philosophical level, as a manifestation of culture, as a flight of the human spirit . . . My mother's attitude toward it was much more practical . . . It can hardly be said that she had musical talents . . . But she had three musical virtues: persistence, love, and taste."
—Sergey Prokofiev, notes from childhood
Three composers born in Russia before the Revolution of 1917 rose to nearly unparalleled prominence during the 20th century: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. Of the three, Sergey Prokofiev is perhaps the most popular but least well understood and closely studied. Like Stravinsky, Prokofiev emigrated from Russia, but unlike him returned voluntarily in the mid 1930s to live out one of the most productive periods of his career in Stalin's Russia. Ironically, he died on the very same day as Stalin. Like Stravinsky, Prokofiev lived and worked in France and the United States. In contrast to Shostakovich, who never emigrated, Prokofiev did not survive Stalin and never assumed a place as an official symbol of the Soviet regime. Like his two contemporaries, Prokofiev showed the same striking versatility as a composer and a performer.
Prokofiev is best remembered for a few popular scores, including Peter and the Wolf and Romeo and Juliet. His various works for the violin, piano, flute, and cello became standard in the repertoire of the 20th century. But much of his music is not well known, and the twists and turns in his career and style demand close inspection and reconsideration. Likewise, his views on art, politics, and the spiritual challenges of modern life require an understanding of the several worlds in which he worked: the St. Petersburg of his youth, Paris in the interwar period, and the United States, where he lived for two years and where he composed his first great zoperatic success, The Love for Three Oranges. His career taken as a whole allows us to rethink the nature of modernism and the connection of music to 20th-century politics and culture in Russia, Europe, and America.
The Bard Music Festival offers the first close examination of Prokofiev's life and career since the historical archives left behind in Russia at his death were opened in 2003. Prokofiev's public was the widest and most international of the three great 20th-century Russian masters. His music reached not only the masses of Soviet citizenry, but it also had a decisive following in the West. It was never too closely associated with the career of Soviet communism. Therefore, this year's Bard Music Festival will not be exclusively a rediscovery, but a comprehensive reconsideration of a well-known figure whose personality and achievement have until now only been understood in a fragmentary and selective manner. The festival will present a wide range of Prokofiev's work and music by his teachers, contemporaries, and successors, including Sergey Taneyev, Aleksandr Glazunov, Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, John Alden Carpenter, and Serge Rachmaninoff, among others. The 19th volume in the award-winning Bard Festival series published by Princeton University Press will be Prokofiev and His World, edited by Simon Morrison.