Festive Poem (Thirty Years), Op. 113 (1947)

Soviet composers were routinely cajoled by cultural czars not only to produce music for state occasions, but also to fashion it to be tuneful and inoffensive to the conservative artistic sensibilities of Josef Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet dictator's music commissar. In 1947, Prokofiev, already a sick man who had had some unpleasant encounters with Soviet authorities over musical matters (and would still have more to come), produced in response to such pressures this 15-minute orchestral work, as well as the short cantata, Flourish, Mighty Homeland, Op. 114, and some songs for the "masses" in a restricted musical language.

The Festive Poem begins serenely, suggesting not a hint of revolution or struggle or victory or much else related to the event it was celebrating. The same mellow music closes the piece, and one can hardly express surprise that the work was not well received by Soviet authorities, who were obviously expecting something more victorious in mood. Even the main theme, a solemn, heroic creation of strong appeal that reaches quite glorious heights just before the quiet ending apparently did not impress authorities. Most of the music is happy and pleasant, but Prokofiev did manage to get a goodly quotient of dissonance into the work, especially in the sharply discordant brass chords that herald the return of the main theme. Some of the music may well be satiric here or simply deliberately nonconformist. Divorced from its historical circumstances and evaluated purely on the sounds it contains, this is a worthwhile though lesser composition.

Text by Robert Cummings