Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October ...

Soviet Music @ Lewes U3A Summer Shorts: a sequence of pieces from the 1930s

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Prokofiev Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution op 74

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (1891 – 1953) lived abroad from 1918 to 1936.

He started rebuilding his career in the Soviet Union after a triumphant concert tour in 1927. By the mid-1930s he was planning to settle back in Moscow. What better way to demonstrate his loyalty to the regime, and burnish his reputation as the leading Soviet composer, than a magnificent Cantata as the musical centrepiece for the 1937 celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution? Sadly Prokofiev misjudged the Soviet appetite for modernist music, so this fascinating score was never performed in his lifetime.

Soviet Music: Summer Shorts Prokofiev Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution


Shaping the text Prokofiev started forming the libretto for the Cantata way back in 1932, while he was still living in France. He worked with two collaborators:

Souvtchinsky – an émigré Sadoul – a French journalist, the correspondent for Izvestia.

The first idea was a Lenin Cantata... with a bit of Marx for context. Souvtchinsky suggested the title: We are coming.

Gradually the concept became grander, growing into a sort of history of communism through Soviet eyes. The final libretto consists of extracts from foundation documents by Marx, Lenin and Stalin, covering:

The birth of Marxism Lenin’s party as the vanguard revolutionary force Seizing power in October 1917 Victory in sight after the Civil War reaches its 1919 turning point Lenin’s death in 1924, and Stalin’s vow to follow his path The 1936 Constitution as the embodiment of all that has been achieved, and the springboard for the future Communist society.



Musical form This work is a “Patriotic Cantata”:

Large orchestra Large choir (sometimes divided into eight sections) Military band Bayan (Accordion) band – an instrument widely used in Russian popular music Musique concrète: real world sounds, such as machine gun fire, sirens, stomping feet, and a speaker with a megaphone for some of Lenin’s words.

Aesthetically this is a complex modernist work. Inspiration appears to have been taken from Soviet Constructivism of the late 1920s:

strange musical juxtapositions the montage effect for text – particularly Lenin’s text – which is reminiscent of some of Sergei Eisenstein’s visual effects in films such as Potemkin and October.

Alarm bells should have been ringing… This is out of line with the new official aesthetic which advocated a simpler style based on Russian music of the last century; folk music with dazzling orchestration, accessible to ordinary workers.



The Lenin Word Montage This Cantata was a major commission – a centrepiece of the 1937 celebration – so it was overseen by a powerful steering committee, led by Kerzhentsev, Chairman of the State Committee on the Arts. The steering committee worried about Cantata’s Revolution section, where Prokofiev built a word montage of extracts from Lenin’s speeches. They suggested he reconsider; instead use a poet’s reflections on Lenin… say Mayakovsky’s epic Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Prokofiev didn’t help his case with his letters to the steering committee:

“the fragmentary nature of the phrases does not disguise Lenin’s thought because they are all taken from the same period, and have the same purpose”. He argued that although on paper some of the text may seem garbled, when set across an eight part chorus the impact would be coherent.

Prokofiev felt he was getting the run around from the steering committee

so he used one of his contacts, Red Army hero Tukhachevsky, who wrote to Molotov – Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. Molotov told Kerzhentsev to back off and accept the Lenin Montage.

A victory for Prokofiev… at least in the short term.



Completed, but unperformed… With Molotov’s blessing Prokofiev completed his score and submitted it in August 1937. In September he performed Cantata for the steering committee – a play-through on the piano, singing the words himself. Kerzhentsev commented:

“What are you thinking of, Sergei Sergeevich? You have taken texts which are public property and set them to incomprehensible music”

Some sources say the steering committee formally rejected Cantata at this stage. But Prokofiev did not appear to hear this message… if it was actually delivered. The October anniversary approached… and passed. In January 1938 he wrote to an old friend:

“Cantata not rehearsed yet – It is very difficult, and everyone is afraid of it” [Letter to Vera Alpers 11/1/38 – quoted Dorokhova Prokofiev’s Cantata 2011 p95]

Time continued to pass, and the work was never approved for performance in his lifetime, so Prokofiev never received 75% of the fee which was due on acceptance. The official line on the work was that it was:

Leftist deviation. No matter how artistically clear and vivid the speeches are of leaders of the Revolution, they are not intended to be sung. When they are transposed to singing, they not only encumber the melodic idiom itself, but lose much of their convincing oratorical power.

[Seroff Sergei Prokofiev: a Soviet Tragedy 1979 p210]



Modern revival Cantata couldn’t be heard during the Stalinist period.

But the Khrushchev Thaw brought wider aesthetic standards. In May 1966 Kyril Kondrashin dusted down the score, and rehearsed it for a major political event, the XXIII Congress of the CPSU.

Modernist music was no longer a problem. Nor was the montage setting of the Lenin texts. But after the rehearsal of the whole work someone in authority questioned the authorship of the text towards the end of the Cantata.

Parts eight and ten use texts by Joseph Stalin... who was a non-person in 1966. Rarely mentioned by name, instead Stalin was obliquely referred to as “The Cult of Personality”.

So the 1966 premiere was abridged.

The first public Soviet performance of the full work appears to have been a radio broadcast on 6 November 1984. An interesting date – celebration of the October Revolution, just before Gorbachev came to power, and before glastnost. The first western public performance was in London in June 1992… six months after the collapse of the USSR. Neeme Järvi conducted the Philharmonia, and Gennady Rozhdestvensky stood in for Lenin on the megaphone.



SYNOPSIS 1. Introduction (instrumental) Marx & Engels Communist Manifesto (1848)

"A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism"

2. Philosophers Marx Feuerbach Theses, xi (1845) “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it” The setting contrasts the words as incantation against the words as soaring melody; I have seen a suggestion that this setting is intended to illustrate the Leninist conception of Dialectical Materialism.

3. Interlude (instrumental) 4. A tight little band Lenin What is to be done? (1901)

“A tight little band, hands firmly joined, we are treading a steep and narrow way. We are surrounded by foes on all sides, and must endure their fire...” This illustrates Lenin’s approach to building a vanguard revolutionary party.

5. Interlude (instrumental) 6. Revolution Lenin – montage of phrases from speeches and articles (autumn 1917)

“The crisis has come... we cannot wait... Let us seize power at once...” Musically, this is a chaotic soundscape. The text, drawn from September and October 1917, reflects Lenin’s persistent call to his often reluctant party to seize power – a campaign which he started with the April Theses immediately after arriving in Petrograd in 1917.



SYNOPSIS (continued)

7. Victory Lenin – montage of phrases from speeches and articles (1920) “Despite abnormally difficult living conditions, despite unheard of efforts by our foes we still triumphed. The ice has broken in every corner of the earth” The turning point of the civil war was reached late in 1919.

8. The Oath Stalin – speech at Lenin’s funeral (1924)

Recurring set of oaths in the form of... “In leaving us Comrade Lenin willed us to hold high and maintain the purity of the status of party member. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall honourably fulfil this, your commandment” These oaths progress through:

safeguarding the party,

strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat and the alliance of workers and peasants,

expanding the USSR, and

building the Communist International.

9. Symphony (instrumental)

Twelve years pass, and the USSR industrialises. 10. The Constitution Stalin (1936)

“It gives us pleasure and joy that the path of struggle and hardship we followed has given us our constitution. It strengthens faith in our powers, and mobilises us for a new struggle to win new victories for communism”

LINK

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Z8Bq35d0k Prokofiev Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution op 74 conducted Neeme Järvi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Z8Bq35d0k

Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October ...

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