Seinen , Nathan Prokofiev's Soviet Operas (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 174 of which is Konstantin Rudnitskii’s seminal book on Meierkhol´d, available in translation. The index is also incomplete in that several names cited in the text do not appear there, an example being that of the cultural commissar Zhdanov, who appears as ‘Zhadanov’ (on p. 163). The Neapolitan author, Elena Ferrante, recently had this to say about the act of writing, of which the present author and his publishers would do well to take note. She speaks of needing the attention of readers ‘who will focus on […] carelessness: mistakes in chronology, repetitiveness, incomprehensible formulations […]. If an editor says: in your text there are good things but we need to work on it, you’re better off withdrawing the manuscript’. London Nick Worrall Seinen, Nathan. Prokofiev’s Soviet Operas. Music Since 1900. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2019. xiv + 255 pp. Musical examples. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £75.00. In this important monograph — two of whose four chapters have already appeared as individual journal articles — Nathan Seinen sheds new light on Sergei Prokof´ev’s long career as an opera composer, focusing on the four works composed in the Soviet Union. As one of the most prominent forms of the nineteenth-century Russian canon, opera resurfaced in the artistically more conservative atmosphere of the 1930s, not least because it seemed able simultaneously to answer the need for forms capable of conveying ideology and propaganda on a mass scale. Noting that Prokof´ev had struggled to get his Ognennyi angel (The Fiery Angel) and Liubov´ k trem apel´sinam (The Love for Three Oranges) staged in the West, Seinen suggests that his return to the Soviet Union may have been motivated, at least in part, by the realization that opera was a genre increasingly favoured by the Soviet authorities. Seinen is alive to the ideological implications of the ‘Soviet opera project’, as it has come to be known, whilst expanding his analytical framework to include aspects of cultural history. His account is rooted in an impressive command of a wide range of archival and critical sources, which help to map the complex network of top-down expectations and behind-the-scenes debates which shaped the genesis of each of the four operas under consideration — Semen Kotko, Voina i mir (War and Peace), Obruchenie v monastyre (Betrothal in a Monastery) and Povest´ o nastoiashchem cheloveke (The Story of a Real Man). A recurrent theme is the concatenation of vicissitudes that Prokof´ev faced at each turn. He was, after all, an experienced composer for the stage, and his return to opera in the Soviet Union should have been an exciting prospect REVIEWS 175 for all concerned. Yet the many years he had lived and worked in the West meant that he was always tainted with the accusation of cosmopolitanism (and later, in 1948, formalism), and none of his operas had either an easy path to the stage, or an untroubled reception. Prokof´ev’s brush with politics is a familiar enough story, of course, but the value of Seinen’s study is the way in which he adroitly moves the debate on to issues of form and genre. Refusing to see Socialist Realism in monolithic terms, Seinen teases out important distinctions between the aesthetic premises governing each opera and deftly unfolds some often unexpected intertextual echoes. Each chapter follows a largely similar structure; after an elaboration of the operas’ literary source texts (Valetin Kataiev, Lev Tolstoi, Richard Brindley Sheridan as translated by Mira Mendel´son, Boris Polevoi), attention turns to a detailed consideration of the musical means deployed, which is then followed by a discussion of the relevant critical reaction. Accordingly, Semen Kotko emerges as a work shaped by the generic conventions of melodrama, whereas Obruchenie v monastyre is ‘an opera-ballet hybrid’ (p. 18), with elements also derived from opera buffa. Voina i mir and Povest´ o nastoiashchem cheloveke emerge as more closely linked to aspects of contemporary history — the cult of personality and wartime leadership in the case of the former, and aspects of Soviet heroism, the New Soviet Person and subjectivity in the case of the latter. Seinen’s attention to...