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Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1915-1922, Volume II: Behind the Mask

A career in the West

Anthony Phillips (translator)
Faber, 775pp, £30,

Oliver Gilmour

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Oliver Gilmour looks at a second volume of Sergei Prokofiev's diaries

Finally, the 1st Piano Concerto (Vol I): ‘They [Diaghilev and the conductor Pierre Monteux] liked it not so much for the music as for its tempo and elan.’ Prokofiev is happy with this remark, but it poses a difficulty, as the music surely cannot be secondary. Elan, surface and ‘effect’ can simply disguise the poverty of the musical material. Perhaps he brought the mindset of a chess-player to composition, a game that obsessed him. Its mental manoeuvres are more intellectual and mechanical, less embedded in the soul, than those required for composing great music.

There is a fascinating cast of characters here: Diaghilev, Stravinsky, the actress Stella Adler, Chaliapin, Matisse, Rachmaninoff, a whole collection of attractive women, even a Herr Gottlieb (not just a Marx brothers’ creation), not to mention Richard Strauss, whom Prokofiev found ‘absent-mindedly charming’. (‘He had a pleasant face with none of the vulgarity of some of his music’). Prokofiev was much fêted by the opposite sex, and he took full advantage after an initial period of shyness. ‘In the evening I had an American girl, typical of Americans in being very beautiful and unresponsive.’ A reunion with Stella in his hotel room was ‘somewhat inhibited by the presence of the female floor superintendant (oh idiotic America!)’. Stella was ‘a water- colour rather than a flamboyant oil painting like Dagmar [another girlfriend]’. Debussy’s opera ‘moves me deeply, but I found my equilibrium disturbed by Dagmar’s proximity, so that Dagmar spoilt Pelléas for me and Pelléas spoilt Dagmar’.

He paints a vivid picture of playing The Rite of Spring with Stravinsky on the piano in 1915 when Igor, ‘normally small and bloodless, became engorged with blood . . . and sang, or rather croaked.’