«Visa is Received and a Place in a Sleeping Car is Booked». Serge Prokofiev and Nicolai Malko: The Quest of the Absolute

The main purpose of this article is to expose some new information about Prokofiev’s  correspondence with Nicolai Andreyevich Malko. Studying the composer and the conductor’s  letters from The Serge Prokofiev Archive (Columbia University, New York) has enlarged understanding of their creative interests’ range, added new traits to the composer’s and the  conductor’s figures, and also enriched the representation of Russian and European musical art. Getting new pieces of information about personality, curious circumstances and life incidents  have not only informative value, all of these components chart the course of the emergence  of new concepts of musical art development. The main narrative stem of the correspondence is found in Nicolai Malko’s letters, while  Prokofiev is not so emotionally involved. An image of a musician with an extremely wide  outlook appears in these letters; he was the person, whose perfectionism, interest in various  spheres of activity, and wish for constant renewal were organic features of his personality. It  is Malko’s letters with his love to narrate, with his recollections, with his stories about people  and insightful music observations, that contain the essence of the correspondence. Both correspondents, whose career in the West had been developed successfully, focused  attention on musical life in USSR. They discussed its attractive features and obstacles that  had to be overcome. In the letters they refer to people of art, officials of music. In these letters, the Prokofiev’s leading theme of innovativeness arises. Malko did not immediately  manage to find an interpretive key to the montage-like (or “building-block”) type of the composer’s  dramaturgy, but he strove to master this method. Among the topics of the correspondence there is also Malko’s indignation at the huge number  of mistakes in Boris Godunov’s original version, as well as in Prokofiev’s works. There are  a sketch-portrait of Joseph Sziget, an essay on Haydn, scenes of private life — a watch for  the conductor’s daughter, which must not only be bought, but also carried across the Soviet  border (Prokofiev has already mastered this practice); attempts to help Myaskovsky’s sister. The content of the correspondence is supplemented by memoirs of the conductor’s wife: they  update the existing knowledge about Prokofiev and Malko. Thus, from the Berta Malko stories  we learn about Prokofiev’s attitude towards the music of Shostakovich and his opera Lady  Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.