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In Russia even Prokofiev's longest works enjoy a mass popularity comparable to that of U.S. best-selling books. While Americans were listening to the Fifth last week, Moscow was awaiting the first performance of Ode to the End of the War, scored for an orchestra with no string section, but with eight harps and four grand pianos thrown in. While he was writing the Fifth, Prokofiev also turned out a new long ballet, Cinderella, an elaborate cinema score for Sergei Eisenstein's picture Ivan the Terrible (he had previously scored Eisenstein's Alexander
Nevsky) and an ambitious opera based on Tolstoi's War and Peace.
Train of Thoughts. When a newsman asked Prokofiev what he was trying to say in his Fifth Symphony, Prokofiev answered: "It is about the spirit of man, his soul or something like that." The impatient, offhand answer was characteristic. Like most musicians, Prokofiev thinks his music should speak for itself.
He composes with the cold matter-of-factness of a mathematician, and keeps stacks of copybooks in which he hoards themes for use in future compositions. He jumps from bed to jot one down; they occur to him while taking walks, and especially while riding on trains, where he finds the metronomic clackety-click of the wheels a spur to composition. When he has saved up enough little scraps of melody, he works out an idea for a large composition to use them in. The Fifth Symphony was based on a twoyears' accumulation; the actual writing took him only two months.
He works regularly between the hours of 10 and noon every day. When he is seriously at work he never listens to anybody else's music; he only goes to Moscow concerts when he is dry. He says he likes to listen to bad music, because it teaches him what faults to avoid in his own. He continually rewrites. Says he: "The moment a composer finds his language and says 'I've got it' he ceases to be interesting."
A Wide Reach. Tall (6 ft. 1 in.), gangling Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev has a clumsy, self-conscious appearance, and lanky, outsize hands which can stretch close to an octave and a half of piano keyboard. The scarecrow awkwardness is particularly apparent when he conducts: he bends only at the knees, so that he constantly seems in danger of toppling over. His idea of relaxation is a game of double solitaire, or of chess. When traveling in the U.S. he carried a miniature set of chessmen around in his pocket, always hopeful of finding someone he could beat. He neither drinks nor smokes, but found it hard during the war to do without candy.