On top of everything else non-musical that he loved (astronomy, biology, writing, etc.) Prokofiev was a fanatical chess player. As a young man, he was a constant presence at the St. Petersburg Chess Club. He played anyone who’d give him a challenge, and maintained dozens of simultaneous chess-by-mail correspondences.
One day in 1914, less than a month after winning the St. Petersburg conservatory’s coveted “Anton Rubinstein Prize for Pianistic Achievements” (performing his own first piano concerto), he took an English lesson and a nap, then rushed over to the chess club and stole a game off of José Raúl Capablanca.
It was part of a simultaneous exhibition - the Cuban chess genius and future chess world champion played 24 games at once that night. On one of those boards, after some luck and a few clever machinations, Prokofiev managed to win.
I was mortally afraid that he had succeeded in extricating himself from the danger, but he did not succeed and soon capitulated. I savored the triumph of my victory and accepted the congratulations of my friends. —Prokofiev’s diary, May 16th 1914.
After the exhibition, the two of them spent the rest of the night chatting and enjoying each other’s company. Prokofiev played for him, Wagner’s Tannhäuser and his own "Harp" prelude, then they walked around St. Petersburg until 3 am. Capablanca and Prokofiev remained friends for life.
For Prokofiev, chess was a lifelong source of friendship and bonding. It was a human game, uniting the two sides of his personality, his passionate intensity and his calculating intellect.
Chess has changed since then.
The year of the Op. 14 sonata, 1912, also saw the arrival of the first chess playing machine: “El Ajedrista.” Designed by a Spanish mechanical engineer, it could play only a simple 3 piece endgame (rook and king vs king), checkmating its opponent using a series of simple rules.
The machines got better, fast. By 2006, the competition was decided. World Champion Kramnik (a helpless human, like you and me) was convincingly crushed by a cruel computer. Added on to Kasparov’s prior historic defeat, this match felt final.
Chess computers now play competitively only with each other, and in their off-seasons, graciously spend some time teaching us how to play. They are programmed not to laugh. It took humans some tens of thousands of years to domesticate dogs, and it’s not really done. We’re still getting bitten. In less than one hundred years computers completely and perfectly subjugated us in chess, and we can’t make a peep.
In the new segregated chess world, humans are stuck on the B team. When we do cross the boundary and play against the A team, chess becomes more than just a game. It becomes an interface with machine intelligence, a controlled conduit by which we can directly experience their frightening dominance.
Prokofiev too lived at the start of a rush of machine ascendancy, not WiFi-toothbrushes yet (nor nanotech nor AI’s with nukes), but screeching and clanging St. Petersburg streetcars, ringing telephones, machine guns, factories, electric fans. Eventually, automobiles too (he loved his Ballot, then his Chevy).
When he was little, growing up on his family’s farm estate, he heard mechanized threshers, reaping machines, mechanical binders, and seed drills, whatever any of those things are. Every morning he listened to his mother’s mechanical piano practicing: she started the day with Hanon (finger exercises). Gramophones and recorded music were appearing too, demonstrating for the first time how scratchy verisimilitude could give you the creeps.
Prokofiev was 21 the summer of 1912, and already 8 years a student at the St. Petersburg conservatory. He had had a happy childhood, and though his father died two years before, he and his mother were making it through somehow. High-strung, sarcastic, mercurial, insanely competitive and hyper-confident, he was a whirlwind of energy and ambition. He staged his own Russian revolution: against Lyadov’s harmony class, against the tastes of his legendary teachers.
In Prokofiev’s early masterpiece, Op. 14, the new music he had invented took its first steps. Harsh dissonances, surprising shifts of character, propulsive rhythms, rogue chromatic lines complicating the harmonies, and an undeniable logic underlying it all.
Oh what a delight is my little Sonata! It looks so sweet, and is a joy to play… that’s good, well-written piano style for you — no need for all that dashing up and down the keyboard…
-Prokofiev’s diary, September 8, 1913 (after receiving the publisher’s proofs of the Sonata Op. 14)
The beginning of the first movement could almost be by Schumann, a quasi-romantic motor. By bar three, things begin to go wrong. A new voice pulls us towards astonishing dissonance - an alarm breaks out, clanging, relentless. Transitional material moves liltingly through weird modulations, and the music wavers always between beauty and ugliness. The motor never stops, except for those few moments when it overheats, sputters, shorts out.
The scherzo sounds like a frenzied assembly line, brittle, dissonant, sometimes teasing… the slow movement is a Russian fairy tale, but behind the woods and the woodsman, the folklore and the magic, something like a circuit-board pulses. You can recall Mussorgsky’s Bydlo struggling through thick mud, but Prokofiev’s ox-cart is part gears and grid, and the ox a whirring automaton.
The last machine, the finale: Hanon, reaping machines, mammoths*, a carnival of pistons and engines, an insane honking horn (the alarm from the first movement!)… everything at once.
Why am I hearing machines everywhere? Maybe it’s just the moment we are living in - the moment the machines have waited so patiently for. At every table, in every restaurant in the world, humans are huddled close, showing each other their phones, worrying about AI. Will it be bad, will it be good? We all wonder. If bad, then let’s quick order dessert and talk about something else.
Even if AI makes our lives easier — then what? If we are spared the drudgery and strain inseparable from being human — when AI takes up that burden — will we remain fully human? Or become something else entirely?
Lost forever are maps, books, street-signs, ordering pizza with a landline, and we are stuck - there’s no getting rid of the machines, these conquering aliens from our own planet. They are learning to understand us more quickly than we them, and all together we are on a one-way trip, no one knows where.
Now, I’m not saying this music is mechanical sounding. Never: it’s so alive and vital. But it is uncanny, both familiar and brand new, human and extra-human at once. I can’t help but hear our permanent future, the overleaping of the Turing test, a foreshadowing of flux and tragedy.
Prokofiev kept a vivid, extraordinarily detailed diary. It is compulsively readable, infinitely quotable, filled to the brim with his astonishing life force. Volume One, now bearing down on my knees, is 800 pages long, from just the years 1907 - 1914.
I now know more about his childhood than I do about my own. It’s dizzying to try to write about him, since it’s all there, down to the minute almost, the process, the waking thoughts, the development of a young genius. The meticulousness and emotional complexity of his music is mirrored by his words.
In the years around the second sonata, he wrote about stage fright, piano practicing, chess, trains and trams and steamers, chess again, conversations, friendship, scores he received on exams, the stock exchange, ice skating, opera class, conducting class, piano lessons, chess, sleigh rides…..
He wrote about his music, about girls (Tonya’s beauty can’t conceal, the fact that she’s an imbecile). He numbered them, for easy reference.
I enjoyed considerable success with the female elements of the conservatoire, notably with 22A… (March 9, 1913).
His father’s illness, his mother:
Mama said “How horrible that sounds, just as if you had no ear at all!” My answer was to close the door. She has no understanding of my music whatsoever. December 5th 1912
There are stories about meeting Medtner, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin (a small, puny, delicate man), about a train ride with Taneyev, about Glazunov’s surprised reactions to his music: “Is that right?” “Yes” I replied, but I can see that until one gets used to it, this chord can seem strange.
The diary is filled with humor and self-deprecation, with just deprecation in general - and somehow always with endless optimism. (I have far too extensive a reserve of joie de vivre for it to be seriously depleted.) He wrote about love (Love is a matter of chance….the simple play of fate…I have refined this thesis to a state of great clarity), and we find him mourning the suicide of his close friend Max Schmidthof, the dedicatee of the sonata.
At night I had an extraordinarily vivid dream about Max…. I went over to the piano….thought that he would most of all like to hear this work he loved so much. I sat down and started to play, and with that woke up. - September 28th 1913.
Of course, I can’t find the diary entry I want, the one to corroborate my ears’ imagination and fit my stubborn conceit:
At night I dreamed I was standing on a treeless plain. Far off, huge and gleaming, stood beings of infinite energy: living machines. Born from the same first materials of the universe as we, imbued with fearsome life, now sensing me, they came charging across the steppe. I awoke. I now imagine a new music, a second sonata… (March 6th, 2026)
I couldn’t find it, so I wrote it myself. I am willfully re-imagining Prokofiev as a composer/engineer, a psychologist of the future, an interpreter for the extra-human.
To me, this complex, ambitious music seems to say that, like a pianist and his instrument (in the best moments), people and machines are one. Phones are new digits in the hands holding them, cars hurdling through the rain wipe away the tears of their passengers, and the screens we never look away from are more than our windows, they are our eyes. We are the machines, they are us. Strange new music will guide us safely through the uncanny valley.
Here’s the whole piece, four movements for the new millennium:
Sound by Aaron Ross, Video by Alessio Romano (Studio 42), piano generously provided by Yamaha Artist Services
p.s. Prokofiev’s November 1918 US debut recital followed months of grueling travel: 18 days on the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, two months in Japan waiting for a visa, some kind of perilous steam-powered crossing of the Pacific, and, before the final train journey to New York City, a three-day customs detention on White Island in San Francisco. Papers report that, Rachmaninoff, having come the other way around the globe, was there in the audience.
New ears for new music! The new ears were necessary to appreciate the new music made by Serge Prokofiev…
His music is volitional and essentially cold.… the sonata, a second one, contains no sustained musical development…*The finale of the work evoked visions of a charge of Mammoths on some vast immemorial Asiatic plateau.
His fingers are steel, his wrists, steel, his biceps and triceps, steel, and scapula steel. He is a tonal steel trust.
-James Huneker, New York Times, November 21st, 1918 writing about the sonata and reviewing Prokofiev’s debut recital in NYC.
Of course, he was wrong, but critics sure knew how to shoot you down and set you aflame with style back then. I too have been the recipient of some unflattering comparisons to large mammals, albeit less poetically expressed. (Los Angeles Times, 2003, “whale in a swimming pool”).
Prokofiev stopped writing diaries in his forties, shortly before returning to the Soviet Union. Diary-keeping was a liability there, a threat to those he mentioned and to himself. His mother had smuggled his old journals out years before, they survived in a safe in the United States until after his death. Only recently were they transcribed by his son and grandson, then translated by Anthony Phillips—all three volumes are now available to anyone who has a bookcase that can support them. In Volume 2 of his diary, he leaves Russia. Volume 3 ends before he returns. The story of the end of his life in the Soviet Union -being crushed by the Soviet machine - is for another sonata.
