Prokofiev initially welcomed the 1917 Revolution as a harbinger of social and national renewal, and his output in that year was prolific: he composed two sonatas, the Violin
Concerto No. 1 in D Major, the Classical Symphony, and the choral work Seven, They Are Seven; he began the magnificent Piano Concerto No. 3 in С Major; and he planned a new opera, The Love for Three Oranges. Stranded in the Caucasus by the civil war, he eventually decided to leave Russia and spent the next decade touring Japan, the United States, and western Europe, performing and writing. While living abroad Prokofiev was a modernist like Stravinsky, avidly seeking musical innovation.
But although Prokofiev enjoyed material well-being, success with the public, and contact with outstanding figures of western culture, in 1932 he returned to Russia for good. As the 1930s developed he gradually adapted to the new conditions and became one of the leading figures of Soviet culture, adopting a more conservative, accessible idiom in conformity with Soviet expectations. The outbreak of the Second World War sharpened Prokofiev's national and patriotic feelings. Regardless of the difficulties of the war years, he composed with remarkable assiduity, even when the evacuation of Moscow in 1941 made it necessary for him to move from one place to another until he was able to return in 1944. The crowning works of his Soviet period were the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1935-6), the cantata Aleksandr Nevsky (1939; adapted from the music that he had written for Sergey Eisenstein's film of the same name), and the operatic interpretation (1942) of Tolstoy's classic novel War and Peace. The realistic and epical traits of his art became more clearly defined at this time, and the synthesis of traditional tonal and melodic means with the stylistic innovations of twentieth-century music was more fully realized.
But Prokofiev's relationship with the authorities was not always easy, despite his organizational work for the
Composers' Union: in 1948, along with other Soviet composers, he was censured by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party for "formalism". After his death in 1953, however, his popularity rose once again, and in 1957 he was posthumously awarded the Soviet Union's highest honour, the Lenin Prize, for his Symphony No, 7.
Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975) is renowned for his 15 symphonies, numerous chamber works, and concerti, many of them written under the pressures of government-imposed standards of Soviet art. Some uphold the Soviet view of the composer as a sincere communist; others view him as a closet dissident. As in literature and the other arts, the cultural climate in the mid-1920s in the Soviet Union was remarkably free, and so Shostakovich was able to write compositions such as Symphony No. 1, of which the stylistic roots and influences were numerous. He continued to openly experiment with avant-garde trends until the late 1920s, when Joseph Stalin fastened an iron hand on Soviet culture. In music a direct and popular style was demanded. Avant-garde music and jazz were officially banned in 1932, and for a while even the stylistically unproblematic Tchaikovsky was out of favour, owing to his quasi-official status in tsarist Russia. Shostakovich did not experience immediate official displeasure, but when it came it was devastating. It has been said that Stalin's anger at what he heard when he attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 precipitated the official condemnation of the opera and of its creator. The opera was not performed again until the cultural thaw in the 1960s.
Shostakovich was bitterly attacked in the official press, and both the opera and the still unperformed Symphony No. 4 (1935-6) were withdrawn. The composer's next major work was his Symphony No. 5 (1937), which was described in the press as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism", A trivial, dutifully "optimistic" work might have been expected: what emerged was compounded largely of serious, even sombre and elegiac music, presented with a compelling directness that scored an immediate success with both the public and the authorities.
With his Symphony No. 5 Shostakovich forged the style that he used in his subsequent compositions. Whereas the earlier symphony had been a sprawling work, founded upon a free proliferation of melodic ideas, the first movement of Symphony No. 5 was marked by melodic concentration and classical form. This single-mindedness is reflected elsewhere in Shostakovich's work in his liking for the monolithic baroque structures of the fugue and chaconne, each of which grows from, or is founded upon, the constant repetition of a single melodic idea.
While Shostakovich's works written during the mid-1940s contain some of his best music - especially the Symphony No. 8 (1943), the Piano Trio (1944), and the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1947-8) - the prevailing seriousness, even grimness, of these works led to his second fall from official grace. Like many other Russian artists, he suffered repression when, at the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet authorities attempted to exert greater control over art. In Moscow in 1948, at a now notorious conference presided over by the Soviet theoretician Andrey Zhdanov, the leading figures of Soviet music, including Shostakovich, were attacked and disgraced. As a result, the quality of Soviet composition slumped in the next few years.
From the time of Stalin's death in 1953 Shostakovich was mostly left to pursue his creative career unhampered by official interference. The composer had visited the United States in 1949, and in 1958 he made an extended tour of western Europe, including Italy (where he had already been elected an honorary member of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome) and Great Britain, where he received an honorary doctorate of music at the University of Oxford. In 1966 he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal.
Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) was a professor at both the Gnesin State Musical and Pedagogical Institute in Moscow and at the Moscow Conservatory. As a young composer, he was influenced by contemporary western music, though in his later works this influence was supplanted by a growing appreciation of folk traditions, not only those of his Armenian forebears, but also those of Georgia, Russia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan.
In 1948, along with Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Khachaturian was accused by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of bourgeois tendencies in his music. He admitted his guilt and was restored to prominence, writing a highly tuneful song in praise of Stalin, After Stalin's death in 1953, however, Khachaturian publicly condemned the Central Committee's accusation, which was formally rescinded in 1958. He was named People's Artist of the Soviet Union in 1954 and was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1959.
Khachaturian wrote music that appealed to the masses, music that glitters with all the traditional Russian expertise in orchestration, orientalism, rhythm, and tunefulness. He is best known for his Piano Concerto (1936) and his ballets Gayane (1942), which includes the popular, stirring "Sabre Dance", and Spartacus (1954).
The Late- and Post-Soviet Period
The best-known composers of the late- and post-Soviet period include Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Alfred Schnittke. In the early 1990s Gubaidulina and Schnittke moved to Germany, where they joined other Russian emigres.
Of these, Schnittke (1934-1998) achieved the most popularity and fame in the West. Virtually unknown outside the Soviet bloc until the mid-1980s, Schnittke rather suddenly acquired a large western following through the efforts of a number of prominent Russian musicians, including Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Gidon Kremer, Yury Bashmet, and Mstislav Rostropovich. A postmodernist Russian composer, he created serious, dark-toned musical works characterized by abrupt juxtapositions of radically different, often contradictory, styles, an approach that came to be known as "polystylism". Like Shostakovich, Schnittke intermingled disjointed elements within a single work, but his combinations were far more jarring — an offhand Beethoven quotation, a distorted folk song, fragments of a medieval chant, and passages of ferociously dense, dissonant serialism might appear within the space of a few minutes.