Frasi di Sergej Sergeevič Prokof'ev

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Sergej Sergeevič Prokof'ev

Data di nascita: 27. Aprile 1891
Data di morte: 5. Marzo 1953

Sergej Sergeevič Prokof'ev è stato un pianista e compositore russo.

Frasi Sergej Sergeevič Prokof'ev

„Il fiore di pietra è il balletto della gioia della fatica creativa per il bene del popolo, della bellezza dell'anima del popolo sovietico, della potenza e delle innumerevoli ricchezze della nostra natura, che si rivelano soltanto davanti al lavoro dell'uomo.“

— Sergej Sergeevič Prokof'ev
citato in Lia Secci, Il «fiore di pietra», La Fiera Letteraria, aprile 1973

Sulla bellezza

„It seemed to me that had Haydn lived to our day he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time. That was the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the classical style. And when I saw that my idea was beginning to work, I called it the Classical Symphony.“

— Sergei Prokofiev
Page 46; from the Autobiography.

„Formalism is music that people don’t understand at first hearing.“

— Sergei Prokofiev
Quoted in Boris Schwarz Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917-1970 (1972) p. 115.

„This is my best work, but only because The Flaming Angel is my greatest.“

— Sergei Prokofiev
He made a rare admission to a visiting musicologist when he was conducting his Third Symphony in Rome in 1934. [http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,864759,00.html time.com]

„The time is past when music was written for a handful of aesthetes. Today vast crowds of people have come face to face with serious music and are waiting with eager impatience. Composers, take heed of this…But this does not mean that you must pander to this audience. Pandering always has an element of insincerity about it and nothing good ever came of that.“

— Sergei Prokofiev
Page 106; from a notebook entry (1937).

„In my view, the composer, just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter, is in duty bound to serve Man, the people. He must beautify human life and defend it. He must be a citizen first and foremost, so that his art might consciously extol human life and lead man to a radiant future. Such is the immutable code of art as I see it.“

— Sergei Prokofiev
Page 136; from his "Music and Life" (1951).

„The first was the classical line, which could be traced back to my early childhood and the Beethoven sonatas I heard my mother play. This line takes sometimes a neo-classical form (sonatas, concertos), sometimes imitates the 18th century classics (gavottes, the Classical symphony, partly the Sinfonietta). The second line, the modern trend, begins with that meeting with Taneyev when he reproached me for the “crudeness” of my harmonies. At first this took the form of a search for my own harmonic language, developing later into a search for a language in which to express powerful emotions (The Phantom, Despair, Diabolical Suggestion, Sarcasms, Scythian Suite, a few of the songs, op. 23, The Gambler, Seven, They Were Seven, the Quintet and the Second Symphony). Although this line covers harmonic language mainly, it also includes new departures in melody, orchestration and drama. The third line is toccata or the “motor” line traceable perhaps to Schumann’s Toccata which made such a powerful impression on me when I first heard it (Etudes, op. 2, Toccata, op. 11, Scherzo, op. 12, the Scherzo of the Second Concerto, the Toccata in the Fifth Concerto, and also the repetitive intensity of the melodic figures in the Scythian Suite, Pas d’acier[The Age of Steel], or passages in the Third Concerto). This line is perhaps the least important. The fourth line is lyrical; it appears first as a thoughtful and meditative mood, not always associated with the melody, or, at any rate, with the long melody (The Fairy-tale, op. 3, Dreams, Autumnal Sketch[Osenneye], Songs, op. 9, The Legend, op. 12), sometimes partly contained in the long melody (choruses on Balmont texts, beginning of the First Violin Concerto, songs to Akhmatova’s poems, Old Granny’s Tales[Tales of an Old Grandmother]). This line was not noticed until much later. For a long time I was given no credit for any lyrical gift whatsoever, and for want of encouragement it developed slowly. But as time went on I gave more and more attention to this aspect of my work. I should like to limit myself to these four “lines,” and to regard the fifth, “grotesque” line which some wish to ascribe to me, as simply a deviation from the other lines. In any case I strenuously object to the very word “grotesque” which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea. As a matter of fact the use of the French word “grotesque” in this sense is a distortion of the meaning. I would prefer my music to be described as “Scherzo-ish” in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo—whimsicality, laughter, mockery.“

— Sergei Prokofiev
Page 36-37; from his fragmentary Autobiography.

„My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.“

— Sergei Prokofiev
Page 7.

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Errico Malatesta15

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Giovanni della Croce28

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Peter O'Toole6

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Altri 69 anniversari oggi

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