Ode To The End of The War for large orchestra Op. 105
Prokofiev, Sergei
25,00 €
Preface
Sergei Prokofiev – Ode To The End of The War Op. 105
(b. Sontsovka, 27 April 1891 -vd. Moskow, 5 March 1953)
for grand orchestra
Preface
Written the year of WW II’s end, four years after the start of the “Great Patriotic War” (i.e., Eastern Front battle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia), only eight years before his death in 1953, and banned from performance in 1948, Sergei Prokofiev’s Op. 105, Ode To The End of The War (Oda na Okonchainie Voyni) represents many things regarding the Neoclassical vanguard’s late-career developments and challenges. Premiered on November 12, 1945 at the P. I. Tchaikovsky Concert Hall under Samuil Samosud, the work fell into obscurity, with the manuscript coming to be held by musicologist and friend Pavel Lamm. Well before then, having lived a life of highs and lows, Prokofiev’s career, which took him across the world, from Japan to America, by the start of WWII, was something of legend.
Having spent time abroad beginning 1918 to 1936, he made the fated choice to settle in Moscow, unknowingly committing himself to a life behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. Despite understanding the change in artistic policy and compositional directives before his return, it was upon his return that the realization of the USSR’s Stalinistic creative direction, namely “Socialist Realism,” truly began to take its effect on the composer. Originating as a literary directive, the communist four-part diktat rejected the arcane experimentation and avant garde tendencies swirling within and defining the pre-Stalinist period. Instead, all art, no matter literary, figurative, musical, or otherwise, was now to be based on three key attributes: Nationalism (all art must be legible by the masses with protagonists being workers and other folk-oriented people), Party Sentiment (all art must be ideological reflective of Socialism’s optimistic core and its positive influence on the people’s lives), and Concrete-ness (the aesthetic reflection of Karl Marx’s “historical materialism” and the development of history through the changes in economic models, labor modalities, and class relations as expressed in socioeconomic conditions). These three elements are but the surface of the diktat’s more subversive interior, the hijacking of art’s didactic functionality as a method of Socialist propaganda in the attempt to change the mass’ very internal psychological disposition towards the USSR itself. Through this lens, it becomes clear that no artist and their expressions could be allowed to be an individual outside the control of the state. Instead, the artist was not a singular actor but one of the proletariat masses and their art belonged to the people in turn. …
read more / weiterlesen … > HERE
Score Data
Score Number | 4992 |
---|---|
Edition | Repertoire Explorer |
Genre | Orchestra |
Pages | 71 |
Size | 210 x 297 mm |
Printing | Reprint |