Prokofiev's Last

Sergei Prokofiev was one of seven Soviet composers (among the others: Khachaturian and Shostakovich) denounced in 1948 "for formalistic and anti-democratic tendencies in music which are alien to the Soviet people." Confessing his "guilt," the great Russian composer promised to mend his Western ways in his next opera, which proved to be his last. Ten months later. The Story of a Real Man was submitted to the Composers' Union, was promptly banned as "anti-melodious" and still reeking with "the decay of bourgeois culture." Now, long after his official post-Stalin rehabilitation and seven years after his death (on the same day as Stalin's), Prokofiev's Real Man is finally being performed for Moscow audiences.

The opera proved that the cultural commissars Lad a supersensitive nose for bourgeois decay and no ear for music. They had completely ignored a libretto that wallowed in patriotism, and a highly melodious score. Based on a Stalin prize-winning novel, Prokofiev's Story tells of a World War II pilot who lost both legs in a crash and lived to fly again, after a harrowing, 17-day crawl behind enemy lines (enacting this scene, the opera's hero sings flat on his belly). With the composer and his wife themselves adapting the tale, the entire effort seems to have been embarrassing and painful to Prokofiev. As he had promised, he did weave a number of tuneful folk motifs into his usual sophisticated, modernist composition, even included a vintage Red army marching song. But the composer seemed somehow unable to conceal his treasonable pessimism and basic disbelief in the opera. When his hospitalized hero grabs a nurse and gaily dances on artificial legs to prove to doctors his fitness for combat, the music is merely polite and detached, fails to milk the emotion of the scene in approved Soviet fashion. Still, as Pravda's music critic wrote last week: "A work about which many overhasty and unfair things were said at one time (by myself among others) has now come into its own."

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