YOU CAN'T SPELL 'ACERBIC' WITHOUT ERIC:

Eric’s Favorite Pieces: Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije Suite

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If movies and literature are any indication, high school is one of the easiest times in a person’s life. Friends are made, everyone looks great all the time, parties involving making out occur with staggering regularity, and occasional vampire attacks keep everyone cheerfully on their toes. This was, it may surprise you to know, not the case at all for me. I was confused! I looked terrible all the time! Girls were far more frightening than vampires (the vampires at my high school were usually stoned, and didn’t pose much of a threat)! I had crippled myself socially by electing to play viola in the school orchestra (who would’ve thought membership in the high school orchestra didn’t come with a lifetime membership in the Playboy Mansion Free Handjob Club and the adoration of all who dared look upon me?)! Life was baffling and tumultuous!

Meanwhile, almost a century earlier, Sergei Prokofiev had written his first opera when he was frigging nine years old. Good thing one of us had things figured out, because as it turned out, Prokofiev helped me through all the tumultuity and bebafflement—possibly without even knowing he was doing it! In fact, I used to listen to the entirety of Abbey Road every morning (while eating crumpets, wondering what it was like to be all cultured and British) and fell asleep listening to Prokofiev’s suite from Lieutenant Kije.

The suite comes from the score of the 1934 movie of the same name (actually, it was originally Romanized as Kizhe, but Prokofiev figured—and rightly so!—that Westerners don’t like Z’s in their words, so he changed it to Kije). The movie is a satire of bureaucracy set in tsarist Russia, during the reign of Paul I. The plot involves a document containing a typo, which the tsar reads as the name of an officer (the eponymous Poruchik Kizhe). Desiring very much to keep being alive by not pissing off the tsar, the characters who made the mistake create a fictitious history for this imaginary typo-lieutenant instead of just pointing out the typo. I’ve never seen the movie, but I imagine that hilarious totalitarian antics ensue. Thank goodness we live in a country and a time wherein it would be completely inconceivable to be called treasonous just for voicing a dissenting opinion (thanks, Fox News, for proving that this truly is the land of the free)!

[If I knew how to put pictures in things, I’d have a picture of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, with the caption “Pictured (L to R): Mindless bullhorn, snarling gasbag”]

Actually, I don’t feel that bad for not having seen the movie. Prokofiev wrote most of the score without having seen the movie. Yeah, he was a pretty good composer. Anyway, the Suite is derived from the score, and consists of five movements: Kije’s Birth, Romance, Kije’s Wedding, Troika, and Kije’s Burial.

Kije’s Birth begins with a somber and militaristic trumpet solo, reminiscent of something like “Taps.” Then the piccolo gets a solo as Kije presumably starts tentatively poking his head out of the fictitious womb. The movement builds dramatically after the tentative head-poking, which always made me think that maybe Kije was born as an adult in full military regalia, dual-wielding pistols and shooting the hell out of the delivery room. Now I think about it, in the context of the film, he sort of was born as an adult, so maybe it makes sense that his birth music is full of enough tumult to make my years in high school seem pretty tame by comparison.

Kije’s Romance was the one that always got me when I first started listening to the piece. I had no idea how girls worked at that point—that was years away, and now I’ve got it allllll under control—but this movement gave me the idea that a “romance” was generally sweet, but also sort of sad, with a haunting quality and also a viola solo. Come to think of it, this may be the first piece I ever heard in which I was consciously aware of a viola solo. It might not be too far off base to suggest that every viola part I’ve ever written was a subconscious attempt to write one as good as the one in the second movement of Kije. Or, it might be way off base and sort of obnoxious. In any case, I learned much later that the actual way a “romance” works is that first it’s kind of cool, and then it’s really sad, and then it’s really really sad, and then sort of embarrassing, and then there’s a lot of drinking, and then it’s haunting. I guess Kije’s relationship went pretty well, since it’s only sort of sad.

And then he gets fake-married, so there’s that. In the film (I’m calling it a “film” and not a “movie” because it’s foreign and from the 30s), made-up Kije actually gets a real wedding with real booze. I’m theorizing that he also gets made-up in-laws who get really drunk and bitch about everything and throw things (isn’t that how a wedding works? People getting drunk and throwing things?). Whatever the made-up circumstances, Kije’s Wedding sounds like it was probably a pretty good time, judging by the music.

I was never too sure what the story behind the “Troika” movement of the suite was about, aside from the fact that it was some sort of sleigh ride. That was never too much of a stretch, either, because of the sleigh bells ringing throughout. I’m pretty sure Kije fake-dies at some point in this movement, and I’ve developed an idea that the sleigh gets hit by a car—there’s an intrusive brass chord toward the end of the movement that sounds for all the world like a car horn. This movement was always a favorite of mine, too, alternating pure wintry joy with an ominous second theme.

The final movement of the suite, Kije’s Burial, begins in a manner almost identical to his birth. Throughout the movement, most of the main themes from the rest of the piece reappear, but slightly transformed and occasionally overlapping each other. I’ve always liked bookend-style narratives, and the effectiveness of the one used in this piece may be one of the reasons.

Does it sound like I’m ascribing too much credit to this piece, just because it was a favorite of mine during formative, bad-glasses-and-acne-ridden years? That may be valid (the part about bad glasses and acne certainly is). I’m not entirely sure myself, but I do remember that Kije was one of the first pieces of music I made an effort to truly absorb, listening to it over and over, making sure there was no element of it that was unfamiliar to me. It’s accessible and melodic, and at the same time intellectually satisfying. I’m going to include a YouTube link, and we’ll see if it affects other people the same way it affects me. For my part, I still get goosebumps listening to this movement.