When Sergei Learned to Drive
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David Hackett5. November 2023
He was one of the most widely-performed composers of the twentieth century, the creator of such undisputed classics as the Classical Symphony, The Love For Three Oranges, Alexander Nevsky, Peter and the Wolf and Romeo and Juliet.
But what did Sergei Prokofiev do when not engaged in writing his masterworks?
He had several main pastimes: chess (which he played to a near professional standard), writing (his collection of journals are some of the finest in literary history) and attending a church for Christian Science. But he had other passions too.
“I have such a soft spot for machinery” he once confessed, having just purchased a new Underwood typewriter for $52 (about $1000 in today’s money), hoping to one day upgrade to an electric stenograph.
But he was much the same about cars, and while living in Paris in the1920s decided it was high time he got behind the wheel of one.
“Today was the day of my first driving lesson” he wrote in his diary on 13 December 1926. He had enrolled at the Versigny School, where his great compatriot, Igor Stravinsky, had also taken lessons:
We headed into the Bois de Boulogne, where [the instructor] explained the function of all the levers. To my dismay, there were far more of them than I had expected. All the declutching, changing gears and so on completely terrified my brains, and then when the car was actually moving I was terrified of hitting something.
Altogether the lesson proceeded in an atmosphere of extreme tension, and I returned home overwhelmed by the complexity of the science, mildly comforted only by the thought that one often finds nineteen-year-old idiots past-masters of the art of driving a car. If they can do it, so can I!
During his second lesson, two days later, and still with no clear idea about how to move the car in a forwards direction, he was asked to negotiate a busy junction (“oh horrors!”) Rumours meanwhile began to spread about the famous composer having been seen “hurtling” around the Bois de Boulogne. One of his friends overheard two passers-by commentating, “things can’t be going too well for Prokofiev – he’s learning how to drive a cab!”
But in the spring of 1927, Prokofiev took his test and passed first time, proudly receiving his carte rose a few days later. After a few supplementary lessons, his confidence grew further. Soon he was taking his car – initially an enormous, second-hand Ballot (which he likened to an “old aristocrat”), later replaced by a more fleet-footed Chevrolet – anywhere and everywhere. He drove around Paris, went on excursions into the country, and in the summer began taking much longer trips deep into the French hinterland.
Breakdowns were frequent – he was forever running his car down to a garage to have it repainted, sometimes lubricated, sometimes to have missing parts replaced. Journey times could be slow by modern-day standards, even as Prokofiev delighted in testing his vehicle’s agility to its limits. He would assiduously record his average speed at the end of each day’s driving, while simultaneously seeing how far he could push the speedometer, once getting up to nearly 100km/h on a stretch of road between Orleans and Paris.
He also had no qualms about taking his vehicle great distances. One reconnaissance mission to the southwest of France, in order to find a holiday home to rent for the summer, took Prokofiev and his young family as far south as Bordeaux, with plenty of detours along the way. Back in Paris, he proudly recorded “the final tally for the trip: 1,688 kilometres in seven days.”
But while driving was fun in the 1920s, it could also be dangerous on the still primitive, poorly surfaced roads. Prokofiev was forever having bumps and scrapes. When once picking up his car after repairs, he managed to “crumple one of the mudguards” when leaving the workshop, before soon after ploughing “into the back of a car belonging to the Turkish embassy, which had slowed down too quickly in front of me.”
On another occasion, he was taking a ride with fellow composers Igor Stravinsky and Vittorio Rieti on the French Riviera. One of his Stravinsky’s sons was driving and being berated by his father to watch out for goats, when their car almost overturned after clipping a wall – something that could have “simultaneously put out of action quite a tally of composers” as Prokofiev drily noted.
He himself was lucky to escape serious injury in the autumn of 1929 when skidding off a road at speed near Paris, although he was concussed afterwards, and spent five days in bed. He also strained some muscles in one of his hands, something that prevented him from performing on the piano for several months.
Prokofiev was of course hardly alone in being swept along by the new driving craze of the time, not even among members of his own profession.
Whenever he and Stravinsky met for coffee in Paris, they might complain about how badly they were being paid for their work, or else argue vigorously about the merits of writing opera. But more often than not, Prokofiev admitted, “most of our conversation, in fact, revolves around automobiles."
To read more from David Hackett, go to www.musicbytheyear.com