... this year. As a young man, Prokofiev took pride in his technical facility: "I would blacken about ten pages of manuscript a day," he boasted. In later life, he composed on trains, ships and in hospital beds. Creation did not involve struggle; it was a drill, an exercise in almost Stakhanovite productivity. Commissar Lunacharsky, allowing Prokofiev to travel abroad in 1918, believed he was exporting Bolshevism. But what had Prokofiev been doing during the revolution? He spent 1917 in Petrograd composing the jauntily anachronistic Classical symphony, modeled on Haydn. (The title, he said, was intended "to enrage the stupid".) Only for 40 seconds, in the 19th of his Visions Fugitives for piano, is the affray of the popular uprising audible: a percussive scattering of gunfire, the panic of fleeing crowds. Perhaps the lethal farce The Love for Three Oranges, commissioned by the Chicago Opera Company in 1920, is his account of ...

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