Category: Music

I recently completed teaching a six-week course on the Ukraine-born Russian/Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), a course I am eager to reprise in the not-too-distant future. His story is by turns both fascinating and tragic, and he wrote a lot of great music—much of it seldom performed. I am amazed that no one has yet produced an English-language documentary on Prokofiev, nor even a biopic.

Since my primary interests are classical music and astronomy, I am naturally curious about significant classical composers who were also interested in astronomy. Prokofiev was one of those composers.

Prokofiev kept fascinating and extensive diaries between 1907 and 1933, a practice which sadly ceased as soon as he began seriously contemplating a return to the Soviet Union and the increasingly repressive regime of Joseph Stalin.

Here are Prokofiev’s astronomy-related entries from those diaries.

26 September 1913
Visited the Andreyevs and showed them my old song “There are other planets”. I love this song, and the other day, inspired by the example of Maddalena, made some revisions to the vocal line. It is now a good song, and Anna Grigorievna liked it very much. She wants to include it in her recital programme in December.

The song Prokofiev is referring to here is Two Poems for voice and piano, op. 9, no. 1. The text is a poem by Russian poet Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942). Here is that poem in an English translation:

There are other planets. The skies are clear and completely calm there, 
the mimosa blossoms are softer, and sweet grasses grow higher. 
The clarity that plays there, it is less changeable than here, 
we cherish it always and can always smile.

There are other planets for another existence.  
We will return there, but later, but much later, 
when a day we have lost cannot be returned to us unchanged, 
when we don’t like anything in this world where the herbs grow grey 
and without fragrance, funereal herbs.

The sweet grass trembles sadly under the stars, 
seeking peace in the mournful places,
and pushes on our tombs, 
so calmly, so calmly, so sad and calm, 
under the serenity of the moon.

16 March 1914
In the evening Mama and I went to hear Zherebtsova-Andreyeva, who had included my song “There are Other Planets” in her programme. I was extremely interested to hear my song, never having heard it performed before. Rather good, although naturally not for the wider public (although actually it was very well received). Anna Grigorievna sang wonderfully, except for her habit of clearing her throat when she finishes singing, but Dulov accompanied drily and he played some wrong notes in the bass.

In this first performance, Anna Grigorievna Zherebtsova-Andreyeva was the singer, and Dulov (first name unknown) was the pianist.

Here is a performance of this work by Andrey Slavny (baritone) and Yuri Serov (piano), recorded at St. Catherine Lutheran Church in St. Petersburg in 1995.

October 1916
I have become deeply interested in the stars. I have always felt drawn to astronomy, and now that I have got hold of Ignatiev’s little book I have begun to study the stars in the night sky, committing their names to memory and tracing out the constellations on paper. But alas, every night last week was cloudy.

The astronomy book Prokofiev was referring to is The World of the Heavens [Nebesny Mir], An Illustrated Astronomy for the General Reader by E. I. Ignatiev, published in St. Petersburg in 1916. Hardly a “little book” at over 400 pages!

7 November 1916
Coming away from Balmont’s, I feasted my eyes on the stars. The layer of cloud had finally dispersed, and what joy it was to see the beauty of Orion, red Aldebaran and Betelgeuse, and the wonderful green and white diamond of Sirius. I gazed at them with newly opened eyes recognizing them from the astronomical maps I had been studying—and felt as though invisible threads were connecting me to the heavens! It was four o’clock in the morning, I should have been asleep, but white Sirius stood directly in front of my window and I could not take my eyes away from him! I took a copy of Sarcasms round to Balmont, with the inscription: “To our Sun, a few fragments of darkness”.

When Prokofiev writes “the green and white diamond of Sirius” he must be referring to the impressive scintillation of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, since at the latitude (50° N) of Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he was at the time, Sirius never reaches an altitude higher than 23° above the horizon.

February 1917
I…read a book about astronomy (I am deeply interested in this subject)…

May 1917
As spring continued my astronomical interest deepened. Naturally, in the perpetually cloudy skies over Petrograd it was a rare gift to be able to see the stars, even so by the time I moved out to my dacha I knew the main stars well enough to distinguish them not merely by their relationship to other heavenly bodies but in their own right, so to say, each one face to face. I decided to buy a telescope and set it up on the balcony of the dacha so that I could look at the stars by night. Wartime conditions in Petrograd meant that the choice was down to two, one of which was a splendid three-inch Fraunhofer (i.e. one of the best makes) refractor, which I bought for 200 roubles. It is quite portable, about two arshins in length mounted on a high tripod base and a lens giving a magnification to the power of seventy. I was incredibly pleased with my purchase and awaited with the greatest impatience a chance to point it at the heavens.

What’s an arshin, you might be wondering? An arshin is an antiquated Russian unit of length equal to 71.12 cm, so “two arshins” would be a little less than 5 ft. in length.

An editorial footnote indicates that “Presumably, Prokofiev’s Fraunhofer was looted or destroyed in the Petrograd flat after his departure in 1918. It would be worth a fortune today.”

Prokofiev continues,

On the 6th I gathered up my telescope, my suitcase and all my things and departed for my country estate. The weather was marvellous, everything was green, but no sooner had I arrived, installed myself, pleasurably inspected my six rooms, corridor, balcony and attic than the thermometer started falling rapidly and it came on to snow, at first mixed with rain and then in earnest, so that the following morning everything around me was as white as if it were January, and not a green leaf anywhere was to be seen poking through the blanket of snow.

My desire to pursue my astronomical activities was so great that when, that first evening, the great clouds scudding across the sky parted just enough to reveal a patch through which stars sparkled, I rushed to mark the place and set up the telescope, huddled in overcoat and scarf and freezing with cold, so that should that part of the sky clear again I would be able to capture the star in my 3-inch refractor. After several unsuccessful attempts I dismantled the telescope and went to bed. My “first telescope night” had not been very successful! After two more days the weather reverted to spring and on the 9th I went to Petrograd to attend the Graduation Concert at the Conservatoire.

I enjoyed myself very much at the concert and even felt a reluctance to return to my “estate” in the evening! I went to Andreyev’s to play bridge, but this was basically an error of judgement because the sky cleared and became very “telescopic”. The planets Mars, Venus and Jupiter were all in conjunction with the Taurus constellation, and I should not have put off viewing them because later on in May Taurus would be in the sky during the day and would not be visible at night.

Prokofiev again continues,

The White Nights are hopeless for the telescope: only the brightest stars (Vega and Arcturus) are visible. I trained the telescope on them but did not derive any great satisfaction; they are simple, uninteresting, stars. But I did observe the moon in her first quarter, studying her empty seas and the craters with which her surface is pitted as though with smallpox.

An editorial footnote indicates that “The White Nights in St. Petersburg are normally regarded as lasting from 11 June to 2 July. During this period the sun does not descend far enough below the horizon for the sky to become dark.”

Now on holiday on the Kama river, a tributary of the Volga, Prokofiev writes,

One evening I had my first sight of the most beautiful and most ancient star Antares. This star is in the southern hemisphere and from our northern lands can be seen only in early summer, appearing so low above the horizon that it is invisible through the roofs and buildings of Petrograd. For several evenings I watched for it on the Kama, and at last it appeared through the clouds precisely in the spot where I was looking for it. This was a great joy to me.

July 1917
I dislike the idea of a whole summer without spending any time in the real south, and gladly fell in with the plan of going for three weeks to Yessentuki. Moreover the black southern sky with its brilliant stars, so unlike those in the pale north, was a seductive prospect for my astronomical passion!

And so the long-desired day finally came, and on the 22nd I was sitting in a comfortable first-class compartment with my suitcase and my telescope speeding to the south.

In Yessentuki I installed myself in a marvellous four-roomed dacha that Boris Verin had rented. In the south again, and full of joy to be there. Sunshine, and at night the southern stars. I can only imagine how bright they must be at the Equator!

August 1917
I took my seat in the local train and went back. Looking through the window at the stars, I saw for the first time my beloved Fomalhaut, a southern-hemisphere star visible to us in the north only in early autumn, and very seldom indeed from the latitude of Petrograd. I have long admired it on the map, where it appears quite on its own, far away from other stars.

When I came back from Kislovodsk to Yessentuki, B. Verin and I trained my telescope, the one I had brought from Petrograd, on Jupiter and found all six of its satellites. As I had just come from my concert I was still in my tails, and so this is how we observed Jupiter—ceremonial dress to honour the splendour of the planet. Also, this evening I learned the disposition of the Hercules constellation, to which our own sun belongs. It is not a simple constellation to master, as its form is complex, the stars are not easily visible, and it is very spread out across the heavens. But Balmont knows it.

Prokofiev would only have been able to see four satellites of Jupiter with his telescope: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. The other two “satellites” must have been background stars. If I have figured correctly, Prokofiev would have been observing Jupiter early morning on Friday, August 24, 1917 (New Style date) which would have been Friday, August 11 (Old Style date) in Russia at that time. The two stars he thought were satellites of Jupiter were probably 8th-magnitude stars HD 28990 and HD 28966.

Prokofiev’s reference to the Sun “belonging” to Hercules indicates he knew about the solar apex, the direction the Sun travels relative to the local standard of rest. William Herschel was the first to demonstrate that the solar apex is in the constellation Hercules.

Balmont refers to the aforementioned poet, Konstantin Balmont.

November 1917
Elections to the Constituent Assembly. (Venus-Jupiter-Sirius-The Moon).

Prokofiev is referring to the 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election during the Russian Revolution, and that he observed Venus, Jupiter, Sirius, and the Moon at Kislovodsk.

18 June [1 July] 1918
At night there is wonderful view of Scorpio and its red Antares. In this region the whole constellation glitters in impressive visibility and does genuinely look like a terrifying mystical beast.

On his way to his first visit to the United States, Prokofiev is spending some time in Japan. At this time he is in Yokohama. At latitude 35° N, he is indeed getting a good view of Scorpius. The date in brackets is the New Style (Gregorian calendar) date, whereas the non-bracket date is the Old Style (Julian calendar) date.

20 July [2 August] 1918
I was allocated a state room on my own, even though I only had a second-class ticket. Lying on my chaise-longue I hardly noticed us slipping imperceptibly away from the shore. The steamship Grotius is a fairly large Dutch boat, 8,000 tons, en route from Java to San Francisco. All evening we stayed in sight of the shore.

That night I slept well, and coming on deck at four o’clock just before dawn, saw the most wonderful sight: in the lightening sky, from which the stars were already disappearing, hung the waning moon and alongside her Jupiter and bright, bright Venus.

Prokofiev is now sailing from Yokohama to San Francisco, by way of Honolulu.

22 July [4 August] 1918
Slept well, rocked by the rolling of the ship. At four o’clock went on deck to see if I could see Venus, but the night was too cloudy.

23 July [5 August] 1918
The night being terribly stuffy, at four o’clock I went on deck. Venus had hidden herself behind clouds, but the dawn was magnificent. I then slept outside in my chaise-longue.

27 July [9 August] 1918
The ocean is calm. The voyage is becoming monotonous. I read Taine, and lack all inclination to compose anything. I cannot concentrate, because round every corner I hear the sound of a Dutchman whistling. I look at the stars and find them absorbing. Mars is in conjunction with Antares: the reddest planet with the reddest star. Which is the brighter and more beautiful I cannot decide, but the light from Antares is alive, while that from Mars is merely a reflection.

27 July [9 August] 1918 bis
A remarkable event today: the second Friday in a single week. As we move eastwards, the time moves forward by half an hour in each day, so there are actually only twenty-three-and-a-half hours in every twenty-four. In this way a complete extra day eventually accumulates, which is accounted for when one crosses the 180-degree meridian.

28 July [10 August] 1918
Red Mars changes its position every day, and I observe its progress. Scorpio is already high in the sky, promising many new southern stars, but the lower part of the sky is always obscured by storm clouds.

Prokofiev is now in New York City.

2 [15] September 1918
In the evening I went with Bolm to some sort of American artistic society, where “clever” ladies harangued me with complicated homilies about the stars under whose protection I currently was. But I went on to the attack and proved to them that they lacked even the most elementary knowledge of astronomy. The organization had tenuous links with Postnikov and his enterprise, and along the way I had come into possession of certain plausible information suggesting that Postnikov was a cheat and a swindler. The ladies were much astonished.

28 May 1920
I boarded a bus and went out to relax in Greenwich Park to “visit the meridian”. Having travelled right around the globe I thought it only right to pay my respects to the meridian from which the earth’s surface takes its measurements. At the top of the hill the Observatory towers up, a forbidding-looking, grey building, but all around the park is green and welcoming.

Prokofiev is, of course, referring to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London, England.

1-31 May 1921
Our joy at meeting again was unconfined on both sides, questions seemed inappropriate. After an hour the three of us (with Linette) went to have dinner and drank a bottle of champagne to celebrate our reunion. B. N. declared that it was the fulfilment of an impossible dream that had sustained him through three dreadful years in Petrograd. Looking at the stars, he had associated me for some reason with Deneb, as if I, like Deneb, existed in some other, inaccessible, world.

This takes place in Paris, and B. N. is Boris Nikolayevich Bashkirov, a wealthy amateur poet and friend of Prokofiev whose pseudonym was Boris Verin. “Linette” is Lina Codina, who would become Prokofiev’s wife in two years’ time.

22 August 1924
Read some Christian Science. When Christians first began to preach the immortality of the soul, the Romans objected that since man comes into being through birth he is inevitably bound to die, for something that is finite at one end cannot be infinite at the other. In answer to this Christian Science states that it is not the case that man (in the shape of his soul) comes into being through birth, and will not die. But if I was never born, that is to say I always existed but with no memory of my previous existence, how can I be sure that this present existence is mine and not that of some other being? After all, if my birth into this world entails the removal of all my memory of the past, for me the past does not exist. In that case the future cannot exist for me either, for by cutting off my memory death also cuts me off, in the same way as birth brought me in. Christian Science’s explanation is therefore not clear to me. Generally speaking there are fewer difficulties believing in the mortality of man than in his immortality. On the other hand, it is also easier to conceive of oneself as a being created by God than as a wholly godless creature of nature. It follows from this that for man the most natural understanding of the world is that expressed by Wells, whose theory I found so attractive a year ago: God exists but man is mortal. Wells believes that man is no more than a stage in the divine creation, one link in the biological chain extending from the primeval slime that first appeared on the surface of the not yet cooled waters of the infant planet, to the superhuman being into which we will one day develop and which, perhaps, will then be deserving of immortality. In the meantime the role of mankind is to play his part in this onward movement during his lifespan and then to die, that is to say to vanish and become a quantité négligeable, in the same way as half-completed sketches and drafts are discarded along the way. Even though Christian Science regards this theory as erroneous, it cannot entirely condemn it because at its heart lies humility, while its elements conform to almost all the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. Christian Science’s teaching is more optimistic but it is essential, before accepting it, to understand and clarify with much greater precision what this teaching consists of.

An editorial footnote states, “When staying in Les Rochelets in the summer of 1921 Prokofiev every evening read aloud a chapter of H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History to his mother and Boris Bashkirov.”

14 March 1925
I did not read much Christian Science, but I did read some, and thought deeply about certain aspects of it, trying to penetrate to its essence. If God created man, then there must necessarily have been a time when man did not exist. But Christian Science disputes this conclusion, asserting that mankind has always existed. And it is true that, if mankind had a beginning then it must also have an end, which is to say that man cannot be immortal, since nothing that is eternal can be finite at one end. Thus the assertion by Christian Science that man is eternal in the future as he is in the past conflicts with the first proposition, that there was an instant in time when God created man, before which there was no man. Similarly, this proposition is contradicted by the following conclusion: if it is so that there was a moment when God, who is eternal, created man, then eternity must have existed before this moment and after it, which suggests that there must be two eternities, each limited at one end. This is demonstrably absurd, since eternity — illimitableness — that is finite at one end is a contradiction in terms. To reconcile these contradictions it is necessary to conclude that our understanding of eternity as one hour succeeding another and so on without end is incorrect, and that beyond the confines of our own world the laws of time (and therefore doubtless of space as well) are quite other. In all probability our death is the route our consciousness takes to exit from the limits of time and space. But if this is so, that is to say our conception of time is no more than a local conception, then by the same token we are incapable of approaching the question of the creation of mankind. We cannot even pose the question: was there a time (in eternity, which does not contain time) when man did not exist? For this reason, it is impossible to answer yes or no to my first question. In the same way the question asked by some people who, when they contemplate the idea of immortality, become so frightened that they cannot decide which is more terrifying, mortality or immortality, should be hors de combat. Such questioners must likewise have it explained to them that in eternity the concept of time cannot exist.

Interesting that this insightful essay was penned on “Pi Day”, since the transcendental π = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795… has infinitely many digits that neither terminate nor enter a permanently repeating pattern.

My take after reading this is that there may be two realities. One reality (our reality) consist of entities that exist within time and space. But there is another reality, where there are entities that exist outside of time and space (of which eternity and infinity are proxies).

As for immortality, since I have no consciousness of anything before I was born, why should I expect that I would have any consciousness of anything after I die? To me, that is the most tragic fact of human existence. Within a few minutes (or hours, if extraordinary measures are taken) after death occurs, all of our knowledge and experience—our memories—are irretrievably lost, and all that remains of us is what we have left behind (writing, music, art, etc.), and the memories of those who are still living who knew us. After all the people who knew us personally have died, then all that remains of our existence are artifacts. And, eventually, all of those will be gone, too. This truly emphasizes the importance of this life, of this world, of this time. How we live our lives and treat others today, tomorrow, and the next day are of paramount importance. It is all we have, or will ever have.

2 May 1925
Through the Borovskys I was invited to visit the Paris Observatory. I was irritated that the Borovskys had assembled a heterogeneous mob of people to come along, who made things worse by being late. We were welcomed by two astronomers, each of whom was in charge of a tower with a telescope. One of them, Fatou, proved to be a great admirer of my music and was exceptionally pleased that I was there, which astonished and flattered me in equal measure. The other astronomer, no doubt because of his colleague, was equally amiable. His name was Jacobi, and he looks as if he drinks, but he is the discoverer of seven comets and has thus immortalised his name: in five hundred, or perhaps a thousand, years people will observe the return of Jacobi’s Comet. The moon displayed marvellous dark blue reflections, and Saturn its rings. They showed us a double star (Gamma Leo), whose separation could be seen quite clearly, but whose colours (each one is a different colour) I could not make out. Apparently astronomers sometimes cannot themselves distinguish the different colours. Afterwards we went to Mrs. Barbara’s to drink wine, where the astronomers asked me to play, which I was most willing to do; they were delighted.

Fatou refers to Pierre Joseph Louis Fatou (1878-1929), mathematician and astronomer. I am virtually certain that “Jacobi” is actually the French astronomer Michel Giacobini (1873–1938).

Here are my observing notes about Gamma Leonis:

Algieba.  Very bright, close double.  Primary is orangish-yellow (2.6 K1-IIIbCN-0.5) and secondary is yellow (3.8 G7IIICN-1).  Relative color seems to change as you watch. 

2 July 1925
I have been reflecting on time, in connection with a thought that struck me earlier: that in that other life, in eternity, there is no conception of time, and consequently time is connected uniquely with our life on earth. This was followed by another thought: that time, as we know it, has only one dimension, and indeed a sub-dimension, in that within this one dimension we can move in only one of its two directions, not both. Even though at first glance it may appear that with the aid of memory we are able to move backwards, this is not in fact so: memory can help us to catch hold of a few fragments of time which lie behind us, but any movement we may make within this fragment can only be forwards. For example, if we recall yesterday’s automobile excursion, we cannot induce our memory to act in such a way that the car retraces its journey back to the place it started from. Is it impossible to conceive of a condition in that “other” world in which time possesses more than one dimension — three, like space, or even where both time and space have four?!

In an attempt to use imagination to go beyond mere scholastic speculation, I started to think what two additional dimensions, width and thickness, could consist of. It is known that the flow of time sometimes leaves no trace: looking back into the past it is hard to say what period has elapsed, a week or a month. And sometimes the opposite is true: a particular hour may contain so many impressions that it would take a whole year to recall them. Is it not legitimate to regard this as a symbol of the greater or lesser thickness of time? And if such a symbolic representation is allowed, then it becomes possible to conceive of moving through time in that dimension. A third dimension of time — width — may be defined as omnipresence, ubiquity. In speaking of omnipresence I am not here confusing time with space, for ubiquity must be understood not only as the ability to be simultaneously in different places in space, but as the ability simultaneously to assimilate multiple different thoughts (God assimilates contemporaneously the prayers of millions of people?). I do not insist that the additional dimensions of time must be those I have suggested, they may be quite other, I submit them merely as examples of the way in which it is possible to imagine time possessing other dimensions.

None of this, needless to say, provides an answer to the question of eternity from the perspective of the infinity of time, just as extending the number of dimensions in space fails to resolve the conundrum of its illimitability. But admitting at least the possible of three-dimensional time, offering the consequent possibility of moving through it in different dimensions, brings with it the obligation to pose many questions in a form not possible heretofore.

18 December 1926
To Gorchakov I expressed the thought that memory of the past is an indispensable constituent element of immortality, because in this life we are cut off from the past when we have lost memory of it. Gorchakov replied that this is an un-Scientific thought because there can be no concept of time in immortality. I objected that it is an error to confuse “time” with “the chronological sequence of events”. If there is no time in eternity, this does not mean that there is no chronology of events; if this were so then chaos would ensue. The characteristic feature of time as we are bound by it in our present existence is its ability to move only in one direction. But it is possible that in eternity the disappearance of our present concept of time may manifest itself precisely in our new-found ability to move in time on both directions, and moreover at any speed we choose. This hypothesis would confirm my proposition that memory is an inseparable part of immortality (equals our own eternal existence) precisely because memory would have the ability to move in either direction and at any velocity.

I think it only fitting to end these excerpts from Prokofiev’s diaries with some of his music. In preparing my Prokofiev course, I came across some noteworthy compositions that were not known to me previously. Most unfortunately, some of these works are almost unknown and seldom played because they were written (under duress, without a doubt) as propaganda pieces. Here is, I believe, his most inspired composition written under such circumstances. It is a cantata for chorus and orchestra that Prokofiev wrote in 1939, called Zdravitsa (literally “A Toast!”), op. 85. It was written to commemorate the 60th birthday of Joseph Stalin. The words are hagiolatry in praise of Stalin (Prokofiev did not write them), but the music is truly divine. Here are three excerpts from a recording by the Russian State Symphony Orchestra and the Russian State Symphonic Cappella, conducted by Valeri Polyansky.

The first excerpt is of the orchestra alone:

Now, choir and orchestra:

And, finally, the glorious finale:

I look forward to the time when Russia will be free from tyranny, and when this gorgeous piece by Sergei Prokofiev gets a new libretto. No longer a toast to the despot Stalin, but a toast to peace-loving people throughout the world!

References
Prokofiev, S. (2006). Diaries 1907-1914: Prodigious youth (A. Phillips, Ed.). Faber & Faber.

Prokofiev, S. (2008). Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1915-1923: Behind the mask (A. Phillips, Ed.). Faber & Faber.

Prokofiev, Sergei. (2012). Sergey Prokofiev diaries 1924-1933: Prodigal son. Faber & Faber.