Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1907 1914 written by Sergei Prokofiev and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1907-1914: Prodigious Youthis an inexhaustibly rich portrait of one of the most vibrantperiods in the whole of Western Art,indispensable for all lovers of Prokofiev.

Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1907 1914 written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He reveals his own developing aesthetic principles through his assessments of the works of others, even as he composes such early masterpieces as the First and Second Piano Concertos, The Ugly Duckling, the First Violin Concerto, and the Classical Symphony."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1915 1922 written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by Gardners Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume of Sergey Prokofiev's recently uncovered Diaries extends from 1915 to 1922 - a momentous epoch in European history, in the personal story of Prokofiev's life, and in the development of his art.

Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1915 1923 written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second volume of Prokofiev's diary records an astonishing record of artistic accomplishment against a backdrop of cataclysmic change. The composer dodges gunfire in Petrograd during the February Revolution, but as a rule pays attention to political events only as they affect him personally. Composition and performance are the main concerns, along with the persistent and ultimately failed struggle to arrange a performance of his opera The Gambler. As in his Conservatory years, he also reveals his own aesthetic principles as he reacts to the work of others, sometimes with dark humor. The years in America were difficult. Always in the shadow of Rachmaninoff, he struggled to establish himself as composer and piano virtuoso. He details the seemingly endless but finally successful battle with the Chicago Civic Opera to mount Love for the Three Oranges, falls in love with the young Stella Adler, and begins work on his third opera, The Fiery Angel. Two years later he is in Paris, where his music is more warmly received than in Russia or America. Here the galaxy of connections grows exponentially as his fame expands. As always, he documents his encounters with sharp, often sardonic insight. The pages of the diary teem with the names of the period's most celebrated artists. There are the Russians Diaghilev, Chaliapin, Kossevitzky, Stravinsky, Mayakovsky ("a fearsome apache"), Meyerhold, and Bakst. But Prokofiev's world now expands to include Ravel, Szymanowski, Marinetti, Mary Garden, Cocteau, Artur Rubenstein, and many others.

Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1924 1933 written by Sergei Prokofiev and published by . This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1998 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects for the first time in English the most representative and enlightening of Prokofiev's letters, including some previously suppressed missives that have never before been published. Expertly translated and annotated by Harlow Robinson, the correspondence presented here covers Prokofiev's earliest years at St. Petersburg Conservatory, his extensive worldwide travels, and his return to Moscow. Among the correspondents are childhood friend Vera Alpers, harpist Eleonora Damskaya, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Soviet critic Boris Asafiev, composers Vernon Duke and Nikolai Miaskovsky, soprano Nina Koshetz, musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, violinist Jascha Heifetz, conductor Serge Koussevitsky, and film director Sergei Eisenstein. Prokofiev vividly describes, often with dramatic flair and a quirky sense of humor, concerts, performances, his compositions, political events, and meetings with other musicians and composers. His observations are peppered with musical gossip as well as eccentric, original, and disarmingly apolitical insights.

Download or read book Lina Serge written by Simon Morrison and published by HMH. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of the renowned composer’s neglected wife—including her years in a Soviet prison—is “a story both riveting and wrenching” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Serge Prokofiev was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant composers yet is an enigma to historians and his fans. Why did he leave the West and move to the Soviet Union despite Stalin’s crimes? Why did his astonishing creativity in the 1930s soon dissolve into a far less inspiring output in his later years? The answers can finally be revealed, thanks to Simon Morrison’s unique and unfettered access to the family’s voluminous papers and his ability to reconstruct the tragic, riveting life of the composer’s wife, Lina. Morrison’s portrait of the marriage of Lina and Serge Prokofiev is the story of a remarkable woman who fought for survival in the face of unbearable betrayal and despair and of the irresistibly talented but heartlessly self-absorbed musician she married. Born to a Spanish father and Russian mother in Madrid at the end of the nineteenth century and raised in Brooklyn, Lina fell in love with a rising-star composer—and defied convention to be with him, courting public censure. She devoted her life to Serge and art, training to be an operatic soprano and following her brilliant husband to Stalin’s Russia. Just as Serge found initial acclaim—before becoming constricted by the harsh doctrine of socialist-realist music—Lina was at first accepted and later scorned, ending her singing career. Serge abandoned her and took up with another woman. Finally, Lina was arrested and shipped off to the gulag in 1948. She would be held in captivity for eight awful years. Meanwhile, Serge found himself the tool of an evil regime to which he was forced to accommodate himself. The contrast between Lina and Serge is one of strength and perseverance versus utter self-absorption, a remarkable human drama that draws on the forces of art, sacrifice, and the struggle against oppression. Readers will never forget the tragic drama of Lina’s life, and never listen to Serge’s music in quite the same way again.

Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev Diaries written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1924 1933 written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 1125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The third and final volume of Prokofiev's Diaries covers the years 1924 to1933 when he was living in Paris. Intimate accounts of the successes and disappointments of a great creative artist at the heart of the European arts world between the two World Wars jostle with witty and trenchant commentaries on the personalities who made up this world. The Diaries document the complex emotional inner world of a Russian exile uncomfortably aware of the nature of life in Stalin's Russia yet increasingly persuaded that his creative gifts would never achieve full maturity separated from the culture, people and land of his birthplace. Since even Prokofiev knew that the USSR was hardly the place to commit inner reflections to paper, the Diaries come to an end after June 1933 although it would be another three years before he, together with his wife and children, finally exchanged the free if materially uncertain life of a cosmopolitan Parisian celebrity for Soviet citizenship and the credo of Socialist Realism within which it struggled to strait-jacket its artists. Volume Three continues the kaleidoscopic impressions and the stylish language - Prokofiev was almost as gifted and idiosyncratic a writer as he was a composer - of its predecessors."--Jacket.

Download or read book Prokofiev s Ballets for Diaghilev written by StephenD. Press and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ballet impresario Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev and composer Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev are eminent figures in twentieth-century cultural history, yet this is the first detailed account of their fifteen-year collaboration. The beginning was not trouble-free, but despite two false starts (Ala i Lolli and the first version of its successor, Chout) Diaghilev maintained his confidence in the composer. With his guidance and encouragement Prokofiev established his mature balletic style. After some years of estrangement during which Prokofiev wrote for choreographer Boris Romanov and conductor/publisher Serge Koussevitsky, Diaghilev came to the composer's rescue at a low point in his Western career. The impresario encouraged Prokofiev's turn towards 'a new simplicity' and offered him a great opportunity for career renewal with a topical ballet on Soviet life (Le Pas d'acier). Even as late as 1928-29 Diaghilev compelled Prokofiev to achieve new heights of expressivity in his characterizations (L'Enfant prodigue). Although Western scholars have investigated Prokofiev's operas, piano works, and symphonies, little attention has been paid to his early ballets written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Despite Prokofiev's devotion to opera, it was his ballets for Diaghilev as much as his concertos and solo piano works that earned his renown in Western Europe in the 1920s. Stephen D. Press discusses the genesis of each ballet, including the important contributions of the scenic designers (Mikhail Larionov, Georgy Yakulov and Georges Rouault) and the choreographer/dancers (L id Massine, Serge Lifar and George Balanchine), and the special relationship between the ballets' progenitors.

Download or read book The People s Artist written by Simon Morrison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-25 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergey Prokofiev was one of the twentieth century's greatest composers--and one of its greatest mysteries. Until now. In The People's Artist, Simon Morrison draws on groundbreaking research to illuminate the life of this major composer, deftly analyzing Prokofiev's music in light of new archival discoveries. Indeed, Morrison was the first scholar to gain access to the composer's sealed files in the Russian State Archives, where he uncovered a wealth of previously unknown scores, writings, correspondence, and unopened journals and diaries. The story he found in these documents is one of lofty hopes and disillusionment, of personal and creative upheavals. Morrison shows that Prokofiev seemed to thrive on uncertainty during his Paris years, stashing scores in suitcases, and ultimately stunning his fellow emigrés by returning to Stalin's Russia. At first, Stalin's regime treated him as a celebrity, but Morrison details how the bureaucratic machine ground him down with corrections and censorship (forcing rewrites of such major works as Romeo and Juliet), until it finally censured him in 1948, ending his career and breaking his health.

Download or read book Nikolay Myaskovsky written by Gregor Tassie and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-05-05 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gregor Tassie describes Nikolay Myaskovsky as “one of the great enigmas of 20th-century Russian music.” Between the two world wars, the symphonies of Myaskovsky enjoyed great popularity and were performed by all major American and European orchestras; they were some of the most inspiring symphonic works of the last hundred years and prolonged the symphonic genre. But accusations of “formalism” at the 1948 USSR Composers Congress resulted in the purposeful neglect of his music until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Myaskovsky wrote some of the most inspiring symphonic works of the last hundred years and prolonged and extended the symphonic genre. In Nikolay Myaskovsky: The Conscience of Russian Music, Tassie gives readers the first modern English-language biography of this Russian composer since his death in 1950. Tassie draws together information from the composer’s diaries and letters, as well as the memoirs of friends and colleagues—even his secret police files—to chronicle Myaskovsky’s early life, subsequent far-reaching influence as a composer, teacher, and journalist, and his final persecution by the Soviet government. This biography will surely rekindle interest in Myaskovsky’s remarkable body of work and will interest aficionados, students, and scholars of the modern classical music tradition and history of the arts in Russia.

Download or read book Diaries 1907 1914 written by Sergey Prokofiev and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. In candid and lively prose, he records the all-too-normal preoccupations of a young man making his way in the brilliant social and artistic circles of the prewar Russian capital. Virtually every artist and musician of note appears in these pages, in penetrating and not always flattering vignettes. Prokofiev's main subject, however, is music, its creation and its performance. He reveals his own developing aesthetic principles through his assessments of the works of others, even as he composes such early masterpieces as the First and Second Piano Concertos, The Ugly Duckling, the First Violin Concerto, and the Classical Symphony. An inexhaustibly rich portrait of a vibrant artistic culture on the edge of war and revolution, Prokofiev's Diaries are both a dramatic illumination of a great composer's creativity and an indispensable contribution to our understanding of musical modernism. They constitute an essential and entertaining reference for all lovers of Prokofiev's music. --Orlando Figes, New York Review of Books, May 10, 2007 "Choice"

Download or read book Intimate Letters written by Leos Janácek and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are the letters of a great love story. In 1917, the Czech composer Leos Janáçek met Kamila Stösslová while on holiday at Luhaçovice, a spa resort in Moravia. He was sixty-three and locked in a loveless marriage; she was twenty-six, the wife of an antique dealer frequently away from home. After the holiday, Janáçek began writing to Stösslová. Undeterred by her lack of interest in his work and her spasmodic replies, he continued to send her letters until his death eleven years later. An extraordinarily self-revealing portrait emerges of an isolated artist at the height of his creative powers and the beginning of his international fame. It is also a portrait of a lonely man who, as the years went by, came to fantasize about Stösslová as his true "wife"--the inspiration for many of the works of his old age. Most of these letters were suppressed until changing conditions in Czechoslovakia allowed their full publication in 1990. John Tyrrell has edited and translated a comprehensive selection, concentrating on the almost daily letters of the final eighteen months. Supported by a diary of meetings between Janáçek and Stösslová, a decoding of the erotic references in the letters, and a selection of mostly unknown photographs, this remarkable book breathes life into the story one of the greatest of operatic composers and provides vital clues to the nature of his creative genius. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Rough Ideas written by Stephen Hough and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays on music and life by the famed classical pianist and composer Stephen Hough is one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards, both for his concerts and his recordings. He is also a writer, composer, and painter, and has been described by The Economist as one of “Twenty Living Polymaths.” Hough writes informally and engagingly about music and the life of a musician, from the broader aspects of what it is to walk out onto a stage or to make a recording, to specialist tips from deep inside the practice room: how to trill, how to pedal, how to practice. He also writes vividly about people he’s known, places he’s traveled to, books he’s read, paintings he’s seen; and he touches on more controversial subjects, such as assisted suicide and abortion. Even religion is there—the possibility of the existence of God, problems with some biblical texts, and the challenges involved in being a gay Catholic. Rough Ideas is an illuminating, constantly surprising introduction to the life and mind of one of our great cultural figures.

Download or read book Film Form written by Sergei Eisenstein and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic on the aesthetics of filmmaking from the pioneering Soviet director who made Battleship Potemkin. Though he completed only a half-dozen films, Sergei Eisenstein remains one of the great names in filmmaking, and is also renowned for his theory and analysis of the medium. Film Form collects twelve essays, written between 1928 and 1945, that demonstrate key points in the development of Eisenstein’s film theory and in particular his analysis of the sound-film medium. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Jay Leyda, this volume allows modern-day film students and fans to gain insights from the man who produced classics such as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible and created the renowned “Odessa Steps” sequence.

Download or read book Leningrad written by Igor Vishnevetsky and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Closing the gap between the contemporary Russian novel and the masterpieces of the early Soviet avant-garde, this masterful mixture of prose and poetry, excerpts from private letters and diaries, and quotes from newspapers and NKVD documents, is a unique amalgam of documentary, philosophical novel, and black humor. Revolving around three central characters—a composer; his lover, Vera; and Vera's husband, a naval officer intercepting enemy communications—we are made witness to the inhuman conditions prevailing during the Siege of Leningrad, against a background of starvation and continuous bombing. In their wild attempts to survive, the protagonists hold on to their art, ideals, and sentiments—hoping that these might somehow remain uncorrupted despite the Bolsheviks, Nazis, and even death itself.