3. Obviously Shostakovich and Prokofiev are different people and different people compose different music but I want to talk about how Prokofiev’s music was different because he was able to travel abroad to Europe and the USA and how it compares to Shostakovich, who said in the Soviet Union.

Introduction to the composer’s background
4. Aged fived Prokofiev composed his first piece for piano, an Indian Galop so named after overhearing grown-up talk about a famine in India.
Composed The Giant, an opera in three Acts for solo piano when he was nine.
Learned piano from his mother and loved to improvise.
He left in 1918 to New York. When he was in the US, he had many misfortunes. Whenever he was about to give a concert, something would happen like the death of the director of the Love for Three Oranges. He struggled financially and was on the edge of living.
So he did not want to return to Russia as a failure, so he went to Paris.
Prokofiev believed, “that an artists work becomes provincial if he never leaves his homeland and tries to exclude every foreign influence...he saw Europe as an opportunity to enrich his music.” (Hanson)
In the 1930s he started to miss his country and wanted to return home.
1938 - Permanently moved back to the Soviet Union (Of course there are many other theories of why he returned)

He had a stubborn personality and it developed ever since he was young. This was said of Prokofiev. Samuel(Prokofiev) : “More than anything he loved to improvise in front of his parents’ friends, but they had to listen, or he would stop abruptly and leave the piano for good – a small flash of temperament from the great artist to come, who was always to retain a somewhat pernickety disposition.

5.5 Both Prokofiev and Shostakovich were monstrous composers. These two quotes will hopefully give you an idea of what kind of composers they were.
Shostakovich said this about Prokofiev, “it was impossible for him...not to compose every day, and the days when he had to “rest” were for him the most painful ones. “
This is the other quote Rabinovich said of Shostakovich: He quoted Shostakovich “The music surged out of me, I could not hold it back,”
He simply could not tear himself away from the score he had begun. He did not leave his writing desk even during air raids. (DS Composer.)

8. So today I’m mainly going to talk abut the pieces they wrote during the wartime. They were asked to write music for propaganda.

What did Prokofiev write
So out of all the music the can write, why did he write a sonata during this time.
In fact he wrote sonatas (3 for the piano and 2 for the violin)
The last sonata he wrote before the war was in 1923 when he married his wife Lina. He composed this in Paris.
He wrote Sonatas when he really wanted to express what he was feeling at the time. He felt closest to piano and it’s the instrument that he begun and grew up with and one that he felt most comfortable expressing himself with.

9. What did Shostakovich write – symphony – Shostakovich also grew up with the piano but how come he didn’t write a piano work?
Shostakovich also grew up with the piano but he didn’t compose sonatas but instead symphonies.
“Mother established the rule at home that as soon as her children reached the age of nine they were given piano lessons. That was the fate of my two sisters, and it was mine, too. Our mother gave us lessons for the first year. My lessons were a great success: I fell in love with the piano and with music.” (AHAHT85)
Sofia Moshevich even wrote a whole book just on Shostakovich as being one of the greatest pianist in his generation.

Why did Shostakovich compose Symphony?
B/c he needed something that really represented how he felt at the time.
He felt most comfortable expressing himself with symphony.

Rabinovich said - Shostakovich thinks in terms of the orchestra. For him “Orchestration” is not a subsequent procedure to give timbre and colour to a prepared musical fabric, a means of giving his work its finishing touches. The orchestral timbres come to him at the same time as the melody, harmony, and rhythm, at the moment the idea is born. This makes it unnecessary for him to begin by writing the piano sketch of a future work- he never composes seated at the piano, but sits at his desk and writes the whole score straight off. (DS Composer)
Shostakovich wrote 6 Symphonies in the time frame of ten years between 1935-1945.

10.

11. Victims – (Jaffe) In October 1932, Stalin had gathered several of the Soviet Union’s leading writers to implement the new doctrine of ‘socialist realism’. Soviet art, he said, was not only to be relevant to the everyday life of the Soviet people, but was also to ‘point out what is leading it towards socialism.
This, in theory, meant that anything negative could be portrayed, so long as it was shown to be overcome by the cause of socialism.
In reality – It limited foreign influence, forced composers to compose certain way/music. Anything against this was considered formalist, in order words, anti-social and self-indulgent.
What did Prokofiev write Prior to the war? After he returned to Russia
He tried to go along with what the government wanted him to compose but doesn’t have much success.

Symphony 5 was tragic. The Soviet authorities required from a symphony to be of folk music and nationalistic ideas. Instead he composed contrary in both mood and style. The soviet did not want formalism, yet the score is abstract and formalistic, while still retaining a certain looseness within those precepts.

The style of his symphonies doesn’t change too much like Prokofiev. Shostakovich uses the same theme over and over again in different ways/different instruments.

12.

16. The war theme –You would think that this was tanks, and airplanes, the Germans attacking and coming closer to his city. Shostakovich claimed that this was not battle music. This war theme really expresses Shostakovich’s feeling of this generalized evil image approaching.

It was then that the idea of the Seventh Symphony began to take shape. The composer drew his strength and inspiration from the people of Leningrad who were prepared for any sacrifices. He said that he dedicated his symphony to the ordinary people whom he respected because every one of them was a potential hero. (DS Composer). He was determined that his people will defend their city. (DS Composer)

Naturally, when they wanted to express themselves the best they would turn to their most comfortable instruments – for Prokofiev would be the piano, for Shostakovich would be the orchestra.

Prokofiev didn’t like Stalin: This was during Stalin’s policy of terror, in which anyone at all might be arrested and charged with crimes against the state. Leading embers of the Red Army Command were charged with treason. Prokofiev toned down his arguments in a Pravda article at the end of 1937. He said (Jaffe) : The search for a musical idiom in keeping with the epoch of socialism is a worthy, but difficult task for the composer… It is something like shooting at a moving target: only by aiming ahead, at tomorrow, will you avoid being left behind at the level of yesterday’s needs. All attempts to ‘play down’ to the listener not only inherently underestimate his cultural maturity and the development of his taste-they also contain an element of insincerity. And music that is insincere cannot endure.
It gave Prokofiev new musical ideas and language that he could use to express himself but doesn’t mean that Shostakovich’s music was any less impacting on people.

Don’t read (In Testimony , “All fascism is repugnant to me, and not just German fascism. Hitler is a criminal, that’s clear. But so is Stalin. I have called my Seventh Symphony the Leningrad Symphony. But it’s not just about Leningrad during the siege. It’s also about the Leningrad that Stalin has been systematically destroying and that Hitler is merely trying to finish off.”
Victims –
“Socialist realism” (Prokofiev Jaffe) – In October 1932, Stalin had gathered several of the Soviet Union’s leading writers to implement the new doctrine of ‘socialist realism’. Soviet art, he said, was not only to be relevant to the everyday life of the Soviet people, but was also to ‘point out what is leading it towards socialism.’ In some ways socialist realism was a logical extension to what was already being done to Russia’s past by Soviet historians: just as their political slant led them to select and even modify historical facts, socialist realism was a way of writing about the present, as if viewed by historians of the fully achieved Soviet State. This, in theory, meant that anything negative could be portrayed, so long as it was shown to be overcome by the cause of socialism. In practice, far greater emphasis was given to the positive aspects of the daily progression to the future Socialist State. Any artistic endeavor thought irrelevant to the aims of socialist realism – particularly anything abstract or ‘personal’ – was ‘formalist’. In other words, it was considered anti-social and self-indulgent. Many writers and artists were to discover that any production or work of art not fully in accord with official policy, or which simply did not meet with the tastes of their ‘leader and teacher’ Stalin, was liable to be branded ‘formalist’, resulting in a ban and quite often the arrest of those responsible.
In reality – It limited foreign influence, forced composers to compose certain way/music. Anything against this was considered formalist, in order words, anti-social and self-indulgent.