On May 2, 1936, in the Central Children’s Theater under the direction of Natalia Sats (modern RAMT), the premiere of the symphonic fairy tale “Peter and the Wolf” by Sergei Prokofiev for reader and orchestra took place. In the field of academic music, this remains the most famous children’s composition. Music critic Stepan Furin invites adult readers to carefully listen to “Peter and the Wolf” in order to discover the similarities in this seemingly simple work with “adult” music and an atypical happy ending with a trick. He also talks about major film adaptations, from Walt Disney to Susie Templeton.
Sergei Prokofiev’s music is not all a fairy tale – it can be dark, barbaric, artificially rough, as if turned upside down. However, the composer constantly returned to fairy tales. His works include “The Ugly Duckling,” “Cinderella,” “Old Grandmother’s Tales,” and many others. It is difficult to say exactly where this love of his came from: Prokofiev never spoke about it openly. However, the phrases “fairy tale” and “splendor” constantly appear in conversations about Prokofiev, and some researchers even assign Articles.
The composer’s interest in fairy-tale plots is almost certainly connected with his childhood memories: at the age of nine, for example, he wrote his first opera, The Colossus, which was performed the following year at his friends’ house. In addition, Prokofiev may have turned to magical realms – and for good reason. He returned to the Soviet Union from emigration in 1936, just before the start of Stalin’s Terror, the struggle against “formalism” in art and World War II. His first marriage to the Spanish singer Lina Lobera was unhappy, and he suffered from depression and obsessions. However, his fairy tales were not exactly escapist, but rather dark and full of the strange.
In Europe and America, Prokofiev is known to audiences primarily as the author of the ballet “Romeo and Juliet” (also, by the way, a rather fairy tale) and the reader’s fairy tale with orchestra “Peter and the Wolf”. This work was commissioned by composer Natalia Sats, creator of the world’s first children’s, musical and dramatic theaters (one of them is the modern RAMT, the other is the Sats Musical Theater). The composer rejected the first version of the libretto written by Nina Sakonskaya, and ended up writing the libretto himself.
“I was afraid that Sergei Sergeevich would write a symphony for children in such a complex musical language that would be highly appreciated by musicians, but inaccessible to children, and for several evenings we spent several evenings asking him to play different pieces of music for me,” Sats wrote in her memoirs. Her fears were not justified – a few pages later she said: “There is now no children’s symphonic work in the whole world more popular than Peter and the Wolf.”
In the twentieth century, many great composers created works for children. He wrote the “Orchestral Guide for Young Listeners”, the piano cycle “Mother Goose” and the ballet “The Child and the Magic”. Countless “children’s albums” have been created – they exist even among extreme avant-garde artists, such as O. But what is so childish in all this music, as in “Peter and the Wolf”?
Art for children is sometimes understood as a simplified version of art for adults. They say that children don’t know anything yet, so you can’t talk to them about difficult things; Children are inattentive, so you need to talk to them briefly; Children are not fussy, so you don’t have to work hard for them. If you really wanted to, Peter and the Wolf could be adapted to these skewed standards: each character is portrayed by some instrument in the orchestra (much simpler), the whole tale lasts about half an hour (much shorter), and the narrator does not sing the text, but pronounces it clearly (much more understandable).
In fact, art for children – if it is real art – is more complicated than it seems. “Peter and the Wolf” is a good example. Yes, each character is associated with an instrument and a particular set of melodies – but neither Richard Wagner in Das Rheingold nor Howard Shore in the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings disdain such techniques. In general, leitmotifs (or mnemonic themes) have been around in music for a long time, since about the 17th century. Associating a small, memorable melody with a place, character or object (such as a magic sword) is a very effective technique, because the leitmotifs can be recognized by almost any listener, which means that it is easy to control interest and emotions with their help. It is not surprising that this technique was adopted by filmmakers in the twentieth century, and today we hear leitmotifs in blockbusters and in auteur films.
At the same time, Prokofiev develops the themes of his characters throughout the story. Fairy-tale music captivates us not so much with its unforgettable motifs as with its original games with rhythms and rhythms: from simple components begins the assembly of a complex whole piece. A string quartet (Petya) flirts with flutes (the bird), oboes (the duck) and clarinets (the cat), interrupted by the double bass (the grandfather), and the trumpets (the wolf) waking up from time to time. Not only do the instruments play the same thing in different combinations, but their themes mix, argue, and influence each other.
Choosing the reader instead of the singer is also an adult technique, and can be found even in Igor Stravinsky’s opera “A Soldier’s Story” or in the cantata “Survivor from Warsaw.” A voice that speaks rather than sings not only conveys plot information reliably, but also interacts with the orchestra in a very special way, forcing listeners to constantly switch between different types of audio information.
The plot of the symphonic tale itself is not that simple either. Petya is a “pioneer” – that word is published in the English text – which means that his story can be viewed from a political angle. The boy then becomes a revolutionary young man, and his grandfather, who forbids hunting the wolf, is the embodiment of the old reactionary generation that does not accept the great revolution, the wolf is an image of bourgeois evil, and the hunters are brave security officers.
However, Prokofiev’s music is more authentic than the propaganda – it has a lot of character, wit and his characteristic cool angle. So, although his politicized interpretation of the right to life, it seems very crude. Moreover, there is nothing primitively Soviet in the score. You can be convinced of this by listening, for example, to Eugene Ormandy’s interpretation with the Philadelphia Orchestra, in which the text is read by David Bowie.
You can find a second bottom in this story, even without resorting to political comparisons. The fairy tale seems to have a happy ending: the wolf is caught, and all the heroes go to the zoo to find him. But suddenly it turns out that the duck that was swallowed by the wolf during the events, and which everyone has forgotten, is still alive – and is screaming in the belly of the predator. At this very moment, the fairy tale ends, and every first child looks to his parents wonderingly: How can they free the bird without killing the wolf?
Bonus: Highlights from the cartoons inspired by Prokofiev’s fairy tale
The film “Peter and the Wolf” was first filmed by Walt Disney. The composer shared the score with him during his final American tour in 1938. It was the 1946 Disney cartoon that introduced English-speaking children to this story. In the film adaptation, Petya became Peter, and the animals got names: the bird was called Sasha, the duck – Sonya, the cat – Ivan. With the exception of a few cuts, the cartoon follows Prokofiev’s text. The style is typical for Disney of those years: with a lot of jokes, a happy ending and funny cranberry additions – such as Cossack hunters in a red caftan on the main character.
In the Soviet Union there were two puppet cartoons based on Peter and the Wolf, both directed by Anatoly Karanovic. scenario FirstlyReleased in 1958, it differs markedly from the original. When Petya stops the cat from eating the duck and the chicks, she summons a wolf from the forest – and then, once the birds have fled, she herself becomes the gray predator’s lunch. But the most important difference is that the cartoon does not have a narrator, as Prokofiev had. The 1976 cartoon is much closer to the original – and kinder towards the cats: in the end everyone is saved and happy, even the wolf that Petya hunted manages to spit out the duck. And the narrator returned to his place.
It is also worth paying attention to the film adaptation by Günter Ritz, released in the German Democratic Republic in 1973 – with a very unique visual style: color combinations – bold as in painting or architecture, and shapes reminiscent “Ladies of Avignon.” Pablo Picasso or “Flower” Mikhail Larionov.
One of the most recent cartoons inspired by “Peter and the Wolf” is Susie Templeton’s version, which won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Its reading differs markedly from previous readings. Petya and his grandfather live here on the outskirts of the forest near the giant sinkholes; In general, the world of cartoons resembles Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s dystopia. Prokofiev’s score is heard in full, but without the narrator’s voice, and the fairy tale is transformed into a philosophical parable of friendship, freedom, and tolerance.