Notes for: July 29, 2008
In his authoritative biography of the composer, Harlow Robinson traces the roots of Peter and the Wolf to Prokofiev’s childhood on a large Ukrainian estate managed by his father. At the age of nine, Prokofiev wrote his first opera and some plays, and his parents gave him an assortment of masks – of a bear, a parrot and monkeys – for use in these presentations. He wrote four plays using the masks and involving talking animals or supernatural spirits..
Moreover, the first play, named People, was a possible forerunner of Peter and the Wolf. It described a forest gathering at which the animals were discussing how to cope with an approaching storm. The discussion degenerated into a stubborn argument, and ended with the appearance of humans who shot the animals dead.
As he matured, Prokofiev maintained his fascination with beasts and the supernatural. It is found in works from all periods of his life, from his setting for voice and piano of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Ugly Duckling to the ballets The Buffoon, Cinderella and The Stone Flower. Peter and the Wolf was part of that pattern, telling the story of a little boy who converses with a bird, duck and cat and outsmarts a rather dull-witted wolf.
Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf in 1936, the year he returned to the Soviet Union to live and work after his 18-year voluntary exile in the United States and Paris. Eager to show his family the cultural life of the capital, he took his wife and two sons to the Moscow Children’s Musical Theater to see an opera for children. The Theater, then and now one of Moscow’s major cultural attractions, had just moved into a new home, and Natalia Satz, the director, suggested to the composer that he produce something for the company’s performance.
Prokofiev had never seen children’s theaters like this in Europe or America, and the combination of excited audiences of youngsters and funny fairy tales on stage reminded him of his childhood productions as a boy. Further, he was having the first of his recurrent troubles with meddlesome Soviet authorities, and he thought a children’s production would provide some relief from the pressure.
Accordingly, Satz and Prokofiev agreed to create a story involving animals and at least one human character. “Each animal would be personified by a different instrument of the orchestra and the human by the strings ensemble,” Prokofiev proposed. “The distinct characters will be reflected in the distinct quality of the various musical timbres. Each character will have its own leitmotif.” Further, a narrator would be used to tell the story in simple language the kids could understand.
Satz hired a young woman poet to write the narration, but Prokofiev was turned off by the rhymed words and cliché language in her version. So he decided to write the text himself in prose, and only a few days later he had completed the text and the piano score. The orchestration was completed nine days after that, one day after Prokofiev’s 45th birthday.
The premiere performance was held at the Children’s Musical Theater on May 2, 1936, with Prokofiev conducting. Satz was to read the narration, but she fell ill at the last minute, and another reader, less prepared and less familiar with the spirit of the piece, substituted for her. As a result, Peter was only a moderate success. A few weeks later, however, Satz read the text in a performance at the Central Pioneer Palace, the home of a Soviet organization for children of grammar-school age, and it was a smash hit.
Soon after, Peter was translated into a number foreign languages, was performed abroad, and enthusiastically received. It has been recorded by a diverse battery of narrators, including Sir Ralph Richardson, Mia Farrow, Sean Connery, Hermione Gingold, William F. Buckley, Leonard Bernstein, Sophia Loren, Jose Ferrer, Itzhak Perlman, Alec Guiness, Sting, Bill Clinton and former Met’s pitcher Tom Seaver.