Featured Book: The Magical Chorus, continued

Copy at Case Memorial Library
Mr. Volkov writes in Part 3, "Rendezvous with Stalin": "At first things went well in the West for Prokofiev, but by the early 1930s he sensed that he would not beat Stravinsky as a composer or Rachmaninoff as a pianist. … And therefore Prokofiev … decided to return to the Soviet Union in 1936. … We will never know how much the principles of Christian Science helped Prokofiev adjust to the realities of Soviet life, but in 1936-1938 [i.e., 1936-1948?] he composed some of his greatest works: the operas War and Peace (after Tolstoy) and Betrothal in a Monastery (after Sheridan's The Duenna), the ballet Cinderella, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and his three best piano sonatas, the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. Other works, overtly tied to the Stalin era, are also masterpieces: the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October (with texts by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin), the Alexander Nevsky cantata (from the score for Eisenstein's film), Hail for Stalin's sixtieth birthday, and the opera Semyon Kotko. It is no accident that of all the Soviet composers, Prokofiev received the most Stalin Prizes — six" (p. 166).