Prokofiev's Farewell

At 60, tired, ailing and scarred by writing to please his Soviet masters, Sergei Prokofiev, Russia's finest modern composer, sat down to write his Seventh Symphony. His aim, he told Pravda, was to "create in music a picture of bright youth." In Philadelphia last week, five weeks after his death, Prokofiev's "Youth Symphony" got its U.S. premiere. The last work of the master turned out to be as pretty and inconsequential as a Hollywood film score.

As Conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra unrolled the 32-minute work, the audience caught a succession of light, volatile themes. There were times when the composer seemed to pull himself up short--as if in fear of going beyond the party's current rules--breaking the long sweep of a natural development to introduce another melody. There were other times when he dressed up a banal moment with humorous orchestral tweaks and twitches, or suddenly stirred up a bee's nest of climax. Only the fourth movement sounded thoroughly like the old Prokofiev; playfully capering themes rippled off into odd harmonic corners and back again almost before the listener knew what was happening.

Moscow applauded the Seventh Symphony at the world premiere last fall, and Pravda itself stamped it doctrinally O.K. Philadelphia's dignified matinee audience, which had half expected to be buffeted and assaulted by modernist clangor, had a pleasant enough half hour, called Conductor Ormandy back for four bows. Sergei Prokofiev had done what he had been told to do: his symphony could be understood by almost anybody on a single hearing. A Philadelphia matron summed up his last work in a sentence. "It sounds," she sighed happily, "just like Gilbert & Sullivan." For Sergei Prokofiev, the composer who once seemed to be leading his musical generation toward powerful new ranges of expression, her words were a tragic epitaph.

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