Sergei Prokofiev was a very industrious person. Usually, he worked even on New Year’s Eve, on January 1, on his birthday, and when he was ill. His head was always full of musical ideas which he wanted to put down even when he had no music paper at hand.

Once, the composer wrote down a melody on a medicine box. When Prokofiev was ill, the doctors forbade him to work. However, he ignored their recommendations.

In 1919, when Prokofiev was creating his opera “Love for Three Oranges”, he fell seriously ill with scarlet fever and diphtheria. He started composing again as soon as his condition slightly improved. He was working on the opera on his hospital bed, hiding the sketches from the doctors. By doing so, the composer was able to finish his opera just in time. He wrote in his diary, “The illness has had a refreshing effect on me, if I can put it that way, and by June, I had finished the entire composition.”

In 1946, Prokofiev was seriously ill. He lay in the Kremlin Hospital and continued composing furtively. While one of his friends was keeping watch at the door of his ward, the composer took a music manuscript from under his pillow and scribbled down his new music. He complained, “How come the doctors do not understand that it is much better for me to write down a melody than to keep it in my memory?”

Prokofiev’s attitude to medication changed throughout his life. For some time, the composer was fascinated with Christian Science, a religious movement founded by the American writer Mary Baker Eddy in 1879. The advocates of this movement denied the existence of illnesses, advised to avoid taking medications, and instead to rely on prayers and self-suggestion.

Prokofiev became interested in this movement in 1924 when one of his acquaintances in Paris told him the story of his miraculous healing. Under the influence of Christian Science, Prokofiev avoided taking any medications for a long time and even stopped wearing glasses. However, in the last years of his life, he once again started taking medicine because he was severely ill.

Name: Medicine box with a musical phrase written on it
№: 5962049
Technique: pencil, writing ink, printing

In the 1940s, Sergei Prokofiev’s music was highly popular abroad, in the Allied countries. The New York audience admired his cantata “Alexander Nevsky” performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, with the Westminster Choir and the American singer of Russian origin Jennie Tourel (born in Vitebsk). The New York Times praised it as a “composition with a unique dramatic effect that reminds the listeners about the current war in Russia.” However, this was not the cantata’s world premiere. “Alexander Nevsky” was first performed in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on May 17, 1939, conducted by Prokofiev himself.

The cantata was written before World War II but became especially relevant during the war years. In this context, the lines “Arise, Russian people!” and “In our native Russia, in great Russia, the enemy will never stand” sounded like a call to fight against the Nazis. The cantata was based on Prokofiev’s music for the film “Alexander Nevsky” by Sergei Eisenstein. Ahead of the concert in New York City, Prokofiev wrote an article for American newspapers where he described the process of transforming the film score into a concert composition, “After the film’s premiere, I had the idea to use the music for a symphonic work with a choir. Creating a cantata from the music was not an easy job since it demanded considerably more effort than the original film composition. Most importantly, I needed to put the cantata on solid musical footing, to build it according to musical forms, to develop it symphonically, and then to re-orchestrate everything, since symphonic orchestration is a completely different thing than orchestration for a film. Despite my attempts to approach the music from a purely symphonic standpoint during this process, a certain element of visuality remained from the film and Eisenstein. Some musicians have objected to this visuality, but for others, it facilitates the perception of music.”