Like the other six composers, Prokofieff accepted the rebuke and made public acknowledgment that he had pursued paths of sterile experimentation in some of his more recent music. He declared that the Resolution of the Central Committee had “separated decayed tissue from healthy tissue in the composers’ creative production,” and that it had created the prerequisites “for the return to health of the entire organism of Soviet music.”
Prokofieff’s _mea culpa_ was first contained in a letter addressed to Tikhon Khrennikoff, general secretary of the Union of Soviet composers. It had been Khrennikoff, who, in a semi-official blast at these “tendencies” had first hurled the charge of “formalism” at Prokofieff and his colleagues, Khrennikoff evidently had in mind certain patterns and formulas of the more extreme innovations of modern music, like Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone row and the many flourishing European schools of atonality, dissonance, and startling instrumental groupings.
“Composers have become infatuated,” said Khrennikoff, “with formalistic innovations, artificially inflated and impracticable orchestral combinations, such as the including of twenty-four trumpets in Khatchaturian’s ‘Symphonic Poem’ or the incredible scoring for sixteen double-basses, eight harps, four pianos, and the exclusion of the rest of the string instruments in Prokofieff’s ‘Ode on the End of War.’”
In pleading guilty to the charge of formalism, Prokofieff attempted to explain how it had found its way into his music:—
“The resolution is all the more important because it has demonstrated that the formalist trend is alien to the Soviet people, that it leads to the impoverishment and decline of music, and has pointed out with definitive clarity the aims which we must strive to achieve as the best way to serve the Soviet people. _Speaking of myself, the elements of formalism were peculiar to my music as long as fifteen or twenty years ago. The infection was caught apparently from contact with a number of Western trends._”
The spectacle of one of the world’s most cherished and gifted composers making apologetic obeisance to political officialdom was hardly a comfortable one for observers outside Russia. The non-Communist press pounced righteously on the Central Committee’s resolution as an arbitrary invasion of the sacred province of art. Charges of irresponsible government interference with the free workings of creative endeavor were widely made, and even writers who had been at least culturally sympathetic to the accomplishments of Soviet art and education waxed indignant over the episode. Many wondered why Prokofieff, of advanced musical craftsmen of our time perhaps the most classical and even the most melodious, should have been singled out at all. This bewilderment was perhaps best expressed by Robert Sabin, of the “Musical America” staff:—