With some composers you know your dislike is their fault not yours. With Prokofiev, you know it's your fault. The vision is so clear, so distinctive, so incapable of being any but Prokofiev's. This is music of the highest conceivable genius, exciting beyond anything in the world, potentially greater than any of his time save Shostakovich, and yet I just can't warm to it.
Why?
It comes down to two things. Prokofiev, to the end of his days, was a child. His music is either an adolescent thrill ride devilish shocks, or full of child-like innocence. Unlike Shostakovich, who looks at the world so head on, there is very little emotional maturity present in Prokofiev.
It's not the worst trait to have, but it does take on some very dark qualities. When I hear Shostakovich, it's impossible not to hear the horrors and suffering of millions, their consolations, their communities and communion, their hopes. But when I hear Prokofiev, it's the world of Sovietism at the creation, when people were naively taken in by an ideology they should have known better about. I hear the militance, I hear the almost gleeful willingness under utopian delusions to shoot and starve millions. So perhaps it's my own fault for reading too much into his music, but I often find Prokofiev a deeply unpleasant experience.
Whereas Shostakovich deliberately made his required Soviet ceremonial work bad, Prokofiev made the dubious decision to take it seriously. It's the natural consequence of Prokofiev's worldview - he returned to the Soviet Union because he was too naive to realize the Soviets would never fulfill their promise of creative control, and believed if he kowtowed to the Soviets, they would treat him like the royalty he believed his genius was owed while treating a hundred million other citizens like dirt.
Prokofiev was a genius, but his daemon was a demon, and his music is the aesthetic result of his uncompassionate spirit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Z8Bq35d0k
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