transposed and replaced, and yet Prokofieff was never quite satisfied with the work. Excerpts were performed in Moscow, and again the music of Prokofieff became a bone of lively contention between those who thought he had captured the spirit of the novel and those who thought he had not. There was general agreement, however, that Prokofieff had written a magnificent and stirring tribute to Russian valor and patriotism. Together with his music for the films “Ivan the Terrible” and “Alexander Nevsky”, the new opera offered an impressive panorama of Russian history. There are in “War and Peace” eleven long scenes and sixty characters. The work was much too long for a single evening, and when it was finally produced in Moscow in 1946, only the first part was performed. A stage premiere had been promised in Moscow as early as 1943, but technical difficulties caused its postponement. Plans for a Metropolitan production for the season of 1944-45 also had to be abandoned.

In 1945 Prokofieff composed his Fifth Symphony, which is considered by many critics the greatest single achievement of his symphonic career. Prokofieff has himself spoken of it as “the culmination of a large part of my creative life.” The symphony was warmly received both in Russia and in America. It has generally been assumed that it depicts both the tragic and heroic phases of the world crisis and an unshaken confidence in final victory over Nazi barbarism. Prokofieff himself would provide no clue to its program other than that it was “a symphony about the spirit of man.”

When Germany was at last defeated, Prokofieff’s pen was again busy celebrating the event. This time it was an “Ode to the End of the War”, scored for sixteen double basses, eight harps and four pianos. In 1947 Prokofieff composed his Sixth Symphony, and it was shortly after its first performance that the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued its stinging denunciation of certain tendencies in the music of Prokofieff and six other Soviet composers. The occasion of the official rebuke was a new opera by Vano Muradeli, “Great Friendship.” This work was found offensive as a distortion of history and a false and imperfect exploitation of national material. Having disposed of Muradeli, the Committee concentrated its attack on the Symphonic Six—Shostakovich, Prokofieff, Khatchaturian, Shebalin, Popoff, and Miaskovsky.

“We are speaking of composers,” read the statement, “who confine themselves to the formalist anti-public trend. This trend has found its fullest manifestation in the works of such composers [naming the six] in whose compositions the formalist distortions, the anti-democratic tendencies in music, alien to the Soviet people and to its artistic taste, are especially graphically represented. Characteristics of such music are the negation of the basic principles of classical music; a sermon for atonality, dissonance and disharmony, as if this were an expression of ‘progress’ and ‘innovation’ in the growth of musical composition as melody; a passion for confused, neuropathic combinations which transform music into cacophony, into a chaotic piling up of sounds. This music reeks strongly of the spirit of the contemporary modernist bourgeois music of Europe and America, which reflects the marasmus of bourgeois culture, the full denial of musical art, its impasse.”

Like the other six composers, Prokofieff accepted the rebuke and made public acknowledgment that he had pursued paths of sterile experimentation in some of his more recent music. He declared that the Resolution of the Central Committee had “separated decayed tissue from healthy tissue in the composers’ creative production,” and that it had created the prerequisites “for the return to health of the entire organism of Soviet music.”

Prokofieff’s mea culpa was first contained in a letter addressed to Tikhon Khrennikoff, general secretary of the Union of Soviet composers. It had been Khrennikoff, who, in a semi-official blast at these “tendencies” had first hurled the charge of “formalism” at Prokofieff and his colleagues, Khrennikoff evidently had in mind certain patterns and formulas of the more extreme innovations of modern music, like Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone row and the many flourishing European schools of atonality, dissonance, and startling instrumental groupings.

“Composers have become infatuated,” said Khrennikoff, “with formalistic innovations, artificially inflated and impracticable orchestral combinations, such as the including of twenty-four trumpets in Khatchaturian’s ‘Symphonic Poem’ or the incredible scoring for sixteen double-basses, eight harps, four pianos, and the exclusion of the rest of the string instruments in Prokofieff’s ‘Ode on the End of War.’”

In pleading guilty to the charge of formalism, Prokofieff attempted to explain how it had found its way into his music:—

“The resolution is all the more important because it has demonstrated that the formalist trend is alien to the Soviet people, that it leads to the impoverishment and decline of music, and has pointed out with definitive clarity the aims which we must strive to achieve as the best way to serve the Soviet people. Speaking of myself, the elements of formalism were peculiar to my music as long as fifteen or twenty years ago. The infection was caught apparently from contact with a number of Western trends.”

The spectacle of one of the world’s most cherished and gifted composers making apologetic obeisance to political officialdom was hardly a comfortable one for observers outside Russia. The non-Communist press pounced righteously on the Central Committee’s resolution as an arbitrary invasion of the sacred province of art. Charges of irresponsible government interference with the free workings of creative endeavor were widely made, and even writers who had been at least culturally sympathetic to the accomplishments of Soviet art and education waxed indignant over the episode. Many wondered why Prokofieff, of advanced musical craftsmen of our time perhaps the most classical and even the most melodious, should have been singled out at all. This bewilderment was perhaps best expressed by Robert Sabin, of the “Musical America” staff:—

“His music is predominantly melodious, harmonically and contrapuntally clear, formally organic without being pedantic, original but unforced—in short an expression of the basic principles of classical music.

“Many of the phrases in the Central Committee’s denunciation are fantastically inappropriate to Prokofieff’s art. Prokofieff has never espoused atonality. He is eminently a democratic composer. Peter and the Wolf is loved by children and unspoiled adults the world over. His music for the film Alexander Nevsky and the cantata he later fashioned from it have been enormously popular. His suite Lieutenant Kijé, originally composed for another motion picture, charmed audiences as soon as it was heard, in 1934. On the contrary, among contemporary masters Prokofieff is precisely one whom we can salute as being close to the people, able to write music that is equally appealing to connoisseurs and less demanding listeners, a man who understands the musical character of simple human beings.

“Perhaps the outstanding psychological trait of Prokofieff’s music has been its splendid healthiness. His Classical Symphony of 1916-17 bounds along with exhilarating energy and spontaneity; and in his works of the last decade, 1941-51, such as the ballet, ‘Cinderella’, the String Quartet No. 2, and the Symphony No. 5, we find the same fullness of creative power, the same acceptance of life and ability to find it good and wholesome. Prokofieff belongs to the company of Bach and Handel in this respect—not