On the evening of 5 March 1953, Sergey Prokofiev’s wife Mira was in the sitting room of the couple’s home near Red Square in Moscow, laying plans for a trip to the country which she felt her husband needed.
He had not been well. The new year had brought a protracted bout of influenza, and in its aftermath depression. ‘My soul hurts’, Prokofiev told Mira when she asked how he was feeling.
When did Prokofiev die?
That March evening, however, something more immediately life-threatening was brewing. As Mira finalised arrangements for departing to their modest dacha in Nikolina Gora, a village 30 miles from Moscow, Prokofiev suddenly appeared, swaying uncertainly in the doorway. Mira swiftly ushered him back to his room, where he apologised for alarming her. A doctor was summoned, but Prokofiev soon lost consciousness. He died around 9pm of a brain haemorrhage, having suffered from headaches, nausea and dizziness for the last eight years of his life.
Aged just 61 at his passing, Prokofiev had spent the previous 17 years living in Russia, after leaving in 1918 during the period of revolution. His return in 1936 was prompted by promises of professional support from the Stalinist authorities, but living in a brutally dictatorial environment involved numerous compromises and confrontations.
Nonetheless, some of Prokofiev’s greatest pieces date from the post-1936 period, the Fifth Symphony, Piano Sonatas Nos 6-8 and the opera War and Peace among them. In normal circumstances, his passing would have been headline news in state-sanctioned media outlets keen to advertise the achievements of the Soviet nation’s supposedly free-thinking artists.
Did Prokofiev and Stalin die on the same day?
Things did not quite turn out that way, however. Just 50 minutes after Prokofiev died on 5 March, another death occurred in the district of Kuntsevo, ten miles west of Moscow city centre. It was that of Joseph Stalin himself, leader of the Soviet Union for three decades and perpetrator of countless viciously repressive acts (including murder) against his own people. Like Prokofiev, Stalin died of a brain haemorrhage.
Predictably, the monolithic machinery of the Soviet state immediately kicked in, preparing for its departed leader’s public funeral. Four days of national mourning were declared, and citizens thronged the Moscow streets – displaying, as the Prokofiev scholar Simon Morrison puts it, ‘an enormous outpouring of grief, real and manufactured, for Stalin’. Acres of newsprint were devoted to the late Soviet dictator, and it was several days before the death of Prokofiev was even reported. One music journal spent its first 115 pages eulogising Stalin, mentioning the composer’s passing only on page 116.
What happened at Prokofiev's funeral?
Stalin mania had serious practical implications for those organising Prokofiev’s funeral. The crowded Moscow streets – so packed that hundreds died of crush injuries – made shifting his coffin difficult in the extreme. The hearse was unable to reach Prokofiev’s home, and his coffin was eventually transported by hand against a tide of milling citizens.
Only a modest funeral ceremony was possible at the Composers’ Union building in Moscow. About 40 people attended, and there were no floral tributes, as all available blooms had been requisitioned for Stalin’s obsequies. The great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who had premiered Prokofiev’s Seventh and Ninth Piano Sonatas, placed a single pine branch on the coffin, and the Beethoven Quartet played music by Tchaikovsky.
Shostakovich was also present. Just five months earlier he had attended the first performance of Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony, where his fellow composer’s creative fire, he judged, still burned brightly. ‘I wish you at least another 100 years to live and create,’ Shostakovich wrote. ‘Listening to such works as your Seventh Symphony makes it much easier and more joyful to live.’
We named Prokofiev one of the best Russian composers of all time.
What else happened the month Prokofiev and Stalin died?
These were the other events from March 1953:
21 March: Recorded by the country music singer Patti Page, Bob Merrill’s ‘(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?’ tops the Billboard Music Popularity Chart in the US and goes on to sell more than two million copies. Shortly afterwards, Lita Roza’s recording of the same song reaches No. 1 in the UK chart, making Roza the first female singer to enjoy the top spot in Britain.
23 March: The French Fauvist painter Raoul Dufy dies in Forcalquier, Provence, aged 75. Initially inspired by Matisse, Dufy’s best known works included depictions of open-air events such as Regatta at Cowes plus music-themed paintings like Homage to Claude Debussy and Red Orchestra. He was also an influential designer of textiles, furniture and stationery.
23 March: Stockhausen’s Schlagtrio for piano and six timpani receives its first public performance at Hartmann’s Musica Viva concert series in Munich. After the performance, Stockhausen withdraws the score on the grounds that it made unreasonable demands of its players and reconfigures it so the six timpani are played by two percussionists rather than three.
26 March: The American virologist Jonas Salk reveals to CBS that a recently developed polio vaccine has proved successful on a small group of children and adults, with the results being published two days later in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Larger scale tests subsequently prove effective, and the vaccine is granted a licence in 1955.
31 March: Seven medics accused of having been part of a Doctors’ Plot to murder leading government officials are exonerated. The plot is believed to been fabricated by Stalin as a pretext to conduct a major purge of political opponents and is immediately discredited after the leader’s death. Several police officers accused of attempting to obtain false evidence are later executed.