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Author : Sergey Prokofiev
Publisher : Gardners Books
Page : 775 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0571226302
The second volume of Sergey Prokofiev's recently uncovered Diaries extends from 1915 to 1922 - a momentous epoch in European history, in the personal story of Prokofiev's life, and in the development of his art.
Author : Sergei Prokofiev
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2022-10-06
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0571380913
Author : Sergey Prokofiev
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 886 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Composers
ISBN : STANFORD:36105123250636
He reveals his own developing aesthetic principles through his assessments of the works of others, even as he composes such early masterpieces as the First and Second Piano Concertos, The Ugly Duckling, the First Violin Concerto, and the Classical Symphony."--BOOK JACKET.
Author : Sergey Prokofiev
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 820 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UCSC:32106019654356
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. 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.
Author : Sergei Prokofiev
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2022-11-17
Category : Composers
ISBN : 0571380905
Author : SERGEI. PROKOFIEV
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 864 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2017-08-24
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0571342892
Author : Sergey Prokofiev
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 1125 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Composers
ISBN : OCLC:1311148623
"The third and final volume of Prokofiev's Diaries covers the years 1924 to1933 when he was living in Paris. Intimate accounts of the successes and disappointments of a great creative artist at the heart of the European arts world between the two World Wars jostle with witty and trenchant commentaries on the personalities who made up this world. The Diaries document the complex emotional inner world of a Russian exile uncomfortably aware of the nature of life in Stalin's Russia yet increasingly persuaded that his creative gifts would never achieve full maturity separated from the culture, people and land of his birthplace. Since even Prokofiev knew that the USSR was hardly the place to commit inner reflections to paper, the Diaries come to an end after June 1933 although it would be another three years before he, together with his wife and children, finally exchanged the free if materially uncertain life of a cosmopolitan Parisian celebrity for Soviet citizenship and the credo of Socialist Realism within which it struggled to strait-jacket its artists. Volume Three continues the kaleidoscopic impressions and the stylish language - Prokofiev was almost as gifted and idiosyncratic a writer as he was a composer - of its predecessors."--Jacket.
Author : Sergey Prokofiev
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Composers
ISBN : 0571281761
Author : Harlow Robinson
Publisher : Plunkett Lake Press
Page : 548 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2019-07-31
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 8210379456XXX
Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography traces the career of one of the most significant — and most popular — composers of the twentieth century. Using materials from previously closed archives in the USSR, from archives in Paris and London, and interviews with family members and musicians who knew and worked with Prokofiev, the biography illuminates the life and music of the prolific creator of such classics as Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, the “Classical” Symphony, the Alexander NevskyCantata, and the Lieutenant Kizhe Suite. Prokofiev (1891-1953) lived a life complicated and enriched by the momentous political and social transformation of his homeland in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Born to a middle-class family in rural Ukraine, he demonstrated amazing music talent at a very early age. In 1904, he began serious musical study at St. Petersburg Conservatory. For graduation, he composed (and performed) his audacious Piano Concerto No.1, which helped to make his name as the “Bad Boy of Russian Music.” As one of the most accomplished pianists of his time, Prokofiev composed many works for the instrument which remain today an important fixture of the concert repertory. Prokofiev fled the chaos following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution for the United States, where he lived and worked for several years, producing his comic opera The Love for Three Oranges and his very popular Third Piano Concerto. But he found American taste too underdeveloped, and moved to Paris in 1923 where he collaborated on ballets with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (including Prodigal Son) and wrote several more operas (The Gambler, The Fiery Angel). Prokofiev also toured widely as a concert pianist, reaching nearly all major European capitals and returning several times to the United States, where his music was promoted by Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During his Paris years, he began returning regularly on tours to the USSR, greeted with ecstatic enthusiasm. Dissatisfied with his music’s reception in Paris, and homesick for Russia, Prokofiev in 1936 made the controversial decision to move with his wife and two sons to Moscow, just as Josef Stalin’s purges were intensifying. Until 1938 he continued to tour abroad. In Moscow and Leningrad, Prokofiev worked with brilliant artists, including film director Sergei Eisenstein (for whom he wrote the scores toAlexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible), pianist Sviatoslav Richter, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and ballerina Galina Ulanova (who danced the role of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet). But life was difficult: during World War II, Prokofiev and his second wife were evacuated to Central Asia. Even so, he managed to compose his gigantic opera War and Peace, his epic Fifth Symphony and many other seminal works of Soviet and world music. After suffering a stroke in 1945, Prokofiev’s health worsened. At the same time, his music was attacked as “formalist” by Stalin’s cultural officials in 1948, when his first wife was arrested and sent to a labor camp. Ironically, Prokofiev died on the very same day as Stalin, March 5, 1953. “One is grateful for Harlow Robinson’s Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography... which is about as good as a musical biography gets: Robinson illuminates the artist’s character, penetrates the human significance of the music, demonstrates an easy command of Russian political and cultural history, and writes with clarity and vigor. Anyone thinking about Prokofiev is deeply in his debt.” — Algis Valiunas, The Weekly Standard “Harlow Robinson’s biography of the composer is the fullest account to date, a thoughtful study of a puzzling personality in and out of music and a comprehensive history of the East-West cultural curtain as it constrained the life and work of the one major artist who had been active on both of its sides... The biographer is fair-minded, generous to Prokofiev but by no means an apologist... the best-written biography of a modern composer.” — Robert Craft, The Washington Post “An indefatigably productive composer who achieved considerable success during his lifetime, Prokofiev seldom seemed satisfied, as he restlessly sought ever-greater recognition. Mr. Robinson explores the darkest corners of this labyrinthine life and brings clarity to some of its more puzzling twists and turns... [he] skillfully relates Prokofiev’s life to greater political and cultural currents.” — Carol J. Oja, The New York Times “[Robinson] tells us more than anyone hitherto about the composer’s life as well as much about the origins and qualities of the music... The first full biography published in English to avoid the pitfalls of cold-war politics... [A] book of many virtues. [Robinson] gives us more facts about Prokofiev’s life than any previous biographer, and he weaves them into a story of politics, art, and romance that marvelously gathers momentum... Robinson writes with the skill of a novelist; but the story, in this instance, is true.” — George Martin, The Opera Quarterly “A splendid life, by a Slavic-studies specialist who is also a musician, of one of our century’s most popular composers... Mr. Robinson’s account of the musical development of his monomaniacal hero is first-rate.” — The New Yorker “[A] well-written, scholarly, and very detailed book...” — April FitzLyon, The Times Literary Supplement “Certainly, there is nothing in English to rival Robinson’s book in scope and detail...” — Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe “[Prokofiev] has long been in need of the full, impressively researched, congenially written study that Robinson gives us.” — Gary Schmidgall, Opera News “[A] fluent, readable and detailed biography of Prokofiev from the perspective of a musically informed cultural historian... Robinson has made a complicated and contradictory life accessible to the western reader... Robinson has performed the important first step of chronicling for the general reader one of the twentieth century’s major musical personalities – and his biography will stitch music into the Russian cultural scene for many professional Slavists as well.” — Caryl Emerson, The Russian Review “The manner in which [Stravinsky and Prokofiev] pursued their careers in tandem for a while is one of the subjects generously described by Harlow Robinson with his flair for interesting and relevant information in his absorbing new biography of Prokofiev.” — Arthur Berger, The New York Review of Books “More detailed and comprehensive, and less politically partisan, than previous biographies, this readable account... deals objectively but compassionately with the life and work of a major Russian composer.” — Publishers Weekly “This is the best biography in English to date on Prokofiev... Robinson candidly exposes Prokofiev’s flaws, from his musical capriciousness and opportunism to his unpardonable social tactlessness... Throughout, the writing is intended for the lay reader — crisp, fast-paced, and unencumbered by technical jargon. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal
Author : Simon Morrison
Publisher : HMH
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2013-03-19
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780547844138
This account of the renowned composer’s neglected wife—including her years in a Soviet prison—is “a story both riveting and wrenching” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Serge Prokofiev was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant composers yet is an enigma to historians and his fans. Why did he leave the West and move to the Soviet Union despite Stalin’s crimes? Why did his astonishing creativity in the 1930s soon dissolve into a far less inspiring output in his later years? The answers can finally be revealed, thanks to Simon Morrison’s unique and unfettered access to the family’s voluminous papers and his ability to reconstruct the tragic, riveting life of the composer’s wife, Lina. Morrison’s portrait of the marriage of Lina and Serge Prokofiev is the story of a remarkable woman who fought for survival in the face of unbearable betrayal and despair and of the irresistibly talented but heartlessly self-absorbed musician she married. Born to a Spanish father and Russian mother in Madrid at the end of the nineteenth century and raised in Brooklyn, Lina fell in love with a rising-star composer—and defied convention to be with him, courting public censure. She devoted her life to Serge and art, training to be an operatic soprano and following her brilliant husband to Stalin’s Russia. Just as Serge found initial acclaim—before becoming constricted by the harsh doctrine of socialist-realist music—Lina was at first accepted and later scorned, ending her singing career. Serge abandoned her and took up with another woman. Finally, Lina was arrested and shipped off to the gulag in 1948. She would be held in captivity for eight awful years. Meanwhile, Serge found himself the tool of an evil regime to which he was forced to accommodate himself. The contrast between Lina and Serge is one of strength and perseverance versus utter self-absorption, a remarkable human drama that draws on the forces of art, sacrifice, and the struggle against oppression. Readers will never forget the tragic drama of Lina’s life, and never listen to Serge’s music in quite the same way again.
Author : Simon Morrison
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 504 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2010-10-25
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780199830985
Sergey Prokofiev was one of the twentieth century's greatest composers--and one of its greatest mysteries. Until now. In The People's Artist, Simon Morrison draws on groundbreaking research to illuminate the life of this major composer, deftly analyzing Prokofiev's music in light of new archival discoveries. Indeed, Morrison was the first scholar to gain access to the composer's sealed files in the Russian State Archives, where he uncovered a wealth of previously unknown scores, writings, correspondence, and unopened journals and diaries. The story he found in these documents is one of lofty hopes and disillusionment, of personal and creative upheavals. Morrison shows that Prokofiev seemed to thrive on uncertainty during his Paris years, stashing scores in suitcases, and ultimately stunning his fellow emigrés by returning to Stalin's Russia. At first, Stalin's regime treated him as a celebrity, but Morrison details how the bureaucratic machine ground him down with corrections and censorship (forcing rewrites of such major works as Romeo and Juliet), until it finally censured him in 1948, ending his career and breaking his health.
Author : StephenD. Press
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781351553063
Ballet impresario Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev and composer Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev are eminent figures in twentieth-century cultural history, yet this is the first detailed account of their fifteen-year collaboration. The beginning was not trouble-free, but despite two false starts (Ala i Lolli and the first version of its successor, Chout) Diaghilev maintained his confidence in the composer. With his guidance and encouragement Prokofiev established his mature balletic style. After some years of estrangement during which Prokofiev wrote for choreographer Boris Romanov and conductor/publisher Serge Koussevitsky, Diaghilev came to the composer's rescue at a low point in his Western career. The impresario encouraged Prokofiev's turn towards 'a new simplicity' and offered him a great opportunity for career renewal with a topical ballet on Soviet life (Le Pas d'acier). Even as late as 1928-29 Diaghilev compelled Prokofiev to achieve new heights of expressivity in his characterizations (L'Enfant prodigue). Although Western scholars have investigated Prokofiev's operas, piano works, and symphonies, little attention has been paid to his early ballets written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Despite Prokofiev's devotion to opera, it was his ballets for Diaghilev as much as his concertos and solo piano works that earned his renown in Western Europe in the 1920s. Stephen D. Press discusses the genesis of each ballet, including the important contributions of the scenic designers (Mikhail Larionov, Georgy Yakulov and Georges Rouault) and the choreographer/dancers (Lid Massine, Serge Lifar and George Balanchine), and the special relationship between the ballets' progenitors.
Author : Leos Janácek
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2014-07-14
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781400863686
These are the letters of a great love story. In 1917, the Czech composer Leos Janáçek met Kamila Stösslová while on holiday at Luhaçovice, a spa resort in Moravia. He was sixty-three and locked in a loveless marriage; she was twenty-six, the wife of an antique dealer frequently away from home. After the holiday, Janáçek began writing to Stösslová. Undeterred by her lack of interest in his work and her spasmodic replies, he continued to send her letters until his death eleven years later. An extraordinarily self-revealing portrait emerges of an isolated artist at the height of his creative powers and the beginning of his international fame. It is also a portrait of a lonely man who, as the years went by, came to fantasize about Stösslová as his true "wife"--the inspiration for many of the works of his old age. Most of these letters were suppressed until changing conditions in Czechoslovakia allowed their full publication in 1990. John Tyrrell has edited and translated a comprehensive selection, concentrating on the almost daily letters of the final eighteen months. Supported by a diary of meetings between Janáçek and Stösslová, a decoding of the erotic references in the letters, and a selection of mostly unknown photographs, this remarkable book breathes life into the story one of the greatest of operatic composers and provides vital clues to the nature of his creative genius. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author : Sergei Eisenstein
Publisher : HMH
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2014-06-17
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780547539478
A classic on the aesthetics of filmmaking from the pioneering Soviet director who made Battleship Potemkin. Though he completed only a half-dozen films, Sergei Eisenstein remains one of the great names in filmmaking, and is also renowned for his theory and analysis of the medium. Film Form collects twelve essays, written between 1928 and 1945, that demonstrate key points in the development of Eisenstein’s film theory and in particular his analysis of the sound-film medium. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Jay Leyda, this volume allows modern-day film students and fans to gain insights from the man who produced classics such as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible and created the renowned “Odessa Steps” sequence.
Author : Nathan Seinen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2019-09-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107088788
Offers a critical and contextual study of the last four operas of Prokofiev, the leading opera composer in Stalin's Soviet Union.
