Paul Griffiths's review of The Music of Sergei Prokofiev by Neil Minturn was published in the TLS of November 28, 1997.

No composer was more adaptable than Prokofiev. It seems he could do anything, and would. A classical symphony? Fine. A fury of savagery to follow The Rite of Spring? No problem. A symbolist song, a Romantic ballet, a paean to the Revolution, a heroic symphony or piano sonata? You name it. For Neil Minturn, in The Music of Sergei Prokofiev, Prokofiev's versatility was that of a gifted and ambitious son eager to please whatever parent was currently in view: some real or internalized conservatory professor, as might have been the case when he was in his teens and early twenties, or Diaghilev on occasion throughout the next decade and more, or Stalin after his return to Russia in his mid-forties, when, with a gift for being in the wrong place at the right time (his life a kind of wrong-note music), he flew bang into the Soviet nightmare at its peak.

This notion of a protracted childhood is plausible and even appealing; after all, here is the composer of what is perhaps the most successful piece of children's music ever written. But equally one should remember that Prokofiev, like Hindemith and others, had a baroque-style facility and willingness to apply himself to given tasks. Composers of their generation were the first to arrive into a world where the modernist explosion of the few years before the First World War had already happened – a postmodernist world, one may justly say, since their experience was much like that of composers today. Modernism that was discovered after the fact – not lived through, as Schoenberg or Stravinsky lived it – could be taken as one of many available styles. Its legacy of path-breaking would be remembered as a freedom to be inconsistent.

Minturn's commitment to set-form analysis in the manner of Allen Forte is, therefore, problematic. Such analysis can detect regulatory features in music that seems, at first or twentieth hearing, chaotic: Schoenberg's Erwartung, for example. But Minturn wants it to help him explain how disruptions to a highly traditional style can be understood as coherent. In the Schoenberg piece, all the notes are, judged in traditional terms, wrong, and Fortean analysis offers a new way of showing that many of them might after all be right in (and this feels true to the case) a shadowy and subconscious fashion. But in Prokofiev's most typical music the wrong note is an occasional and highly conspicuous intruder, so that to comprehend it as somehow but impalpably right is to denature it. One wants – as Minturn is very aware, and as he sometimes begins to provide – a double-decker analysis. On one level, the music would be shown as following a traditional tonal course, with wrong notes (or wrong rhythms) as irritants. On another, those wrong notes and rhythms would be shown as obedient to a different sort of order.

Whether that order is best approached along Fortean lines is the point at issue. The sets Minturn discovers are close relatives of the most basic diatonic types: very often major or minor triads with one or more added notes, or augmented triads, which also may have an additional note. Caution is needed, therefore, if these fundamentally tonal features are to be used to identify flagrantly anti-tonal proceedings within a piece of music. Otherwise one may end up saying, in however elaborate terms, no more than that wrong-note music contains wrong notes.

In his discussion of the Classical Symphony, for example, Minturn quotes Jonathan D. Kramer's nice idea that "we can 'hear' a hypothetical original version of the music lurking beneath the surface . . . as if we could remove the witticisms and discover a truly classical symphony". What this suggests is precisely an analysis on two levels - an analysis that might start out from a recomposition of the work to arrive at that "hypothetical original version". Minturn indeed points out some false moves, rhythmic and harmonic, within the first movement, but he stops short of projecting a "corrected" score, and his analyses point to aspects we are just as likely to find in a Haydn movement: ambiguity of phrasing, surprise and delayed resolution. We never quite find the flavour that makes Prokofiev's work unmistakably a twentieth-century creation, and unmistakably his.

Nevertheless, Minturn has a great deal of interest to say, in more conventional and even old-fashioned critical language, about a wide range of Prokofiev's compositions, and his sympathy seems to go out especially to those off the beaten path: the Pensees for piano, the Sixth Symphony, the First Violin Sonata ("no other work of Prokofiev's exceeds its depth and profundity"), the first of the Akhmatova songs (where at the end "the tempo slackens to portray the gradual fall into sleep"), the opera The Gambler. He perhaps betrays his own Romantic inclinations in the value he places on manifested seriousness and in his confidence in musical portraiture, but he persuades us that Prokofiev would have felt the same way, and by treating the works by genre rather than by period, he traces the outline of a creative personality that persisted through all the changes of style and location.

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