Well hey, wouldja lookit this? It actually was easier to see than I had thought: this recording has dual-language subs in Russian and English even! Nice!
So Aleksey (a real guy) is a Russian fighter pilot during World War II who is shot down and badly injured by the Germans. He makes it to a Russian village where he's taken care of; there, he meets one of his military compatriots and is transferred to a hospital, where he stays with other highly patriotic soldiers. Unfortunately, it is necessary to amputate his legs. This bums him out, but he is determined to continue flying (with prosthetic legs). Unfortunately, the military authorities disapprove of this dangerous and wildly irresponsible idea. However, the doctors like his moxie and they help him make his dream happen. Later, after he's been involved in some sort of aerial battle, everyone thinks he's been killed, but no! And he shot down some Germans, too! And yes he was a real guy who really did have military success as an amputee and then survived the war; that really doesn't make the whole thing seem like a less-bad idea. Anyway, at the end it turns out that his much-missed fiancée Olga has also joined the Red Army! So now they can be patriotic together! Whoo!
I mean, obviously, we're all glad that the Russians defeated the Germans (less so that they murdered Raoul Wallenberg), but that doesn't mean that this libretto (based on a novel) isn't leaden propaganda. Semyon Kotko seems like a dynamic and independent-minded piece of work, comparatively. Still, never mind that, or not too much; it also demonstrates Prokofiev's range rather effectively: we've got our dramatic crescendos, our lively folk dances, and a certain amount of "zany" music for comic numbers (which do feel kind of incongruous in this kind of story, but never mind). So I enjoyed it more than not. Prokofiev may not be one of my all-time favorites, but he's kinda grown on me.
Anyway, here's this, from wikipedia:
The opera received its premiere on 3 December 1948 at the Kirov Theatre, Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). The audience was made up of Soviet cultural officials who gave the work a poor reception. This was a great disappointment to the composer who had intended the opera to rehabilitate his reputation with the Communist authorities after he had been accused of "formalism" earlier in the year. As a result, performances of The Story of a Real Man were forbidden to the general public until after Prokofiev's death. It received its public premiere on 7 October 1960 at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow.
Flipping heck, man: you just CANNOT WIN with the goddamn Soviet cultural officers. I say, if you were going to write operas in that time and place, don't worry about what these people want: their whims are inscrutable and you cannot win. No matter how craven your propaganda, it will not help you! Of course, that's easy for me to say, and I realize that the consequences could be even worse for you if you didn't at least make an effort. Still, we're lucky that he persisted in writing operas at all, given the oppressive artistic atmosphere. Compare to Shostakovich, who prudently (but to our cultural detriment) gave up the practice.
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