Bottoms up

Prokofiev and Balanchine collaborated on the ballet The Prodigal Son of 1929, but as one of the most entertaining passages in the diary makes clear, Prokofiev hated it. He told Balanchine that ‘it would be desirable to moderate the lasciviousness of the Siren’s dance: a loose woman in biblical times would not have behaved in the same way as a modern prostitute, the representation must be refracted through the prism of the intervening centuries.’

Evidently Prokofiev wanted his score to provide this prism, hence the clichéd musical exotica and occasional use of church modes. His anger increased when he discovered that Balanchine also planned to expose the bottoms of the Prodigal Son’s sisters. Diaghilev listened impatiently as Prokofiev vented, then replied: ‘I keep hearing about this … and I must tell you that I very much like this bare bottom. The choreographer does not presume to interfere with your music, and you should not interfere with his dances.’ Prokofiev fumed about the choreography ‘shitting’ on his music; Stravinsky coolly sympathised, telling Prokofiev that ‘everyone’ in the Ballets Russes ‘is tiring of these indecencies and they are quite inappropriate here, but, as a general observation, I would not have gone near a Gospel subject for this theatre.’ It was porn, Prokofiev insisted, and bad porn at that, the dance misaligned with the music: ‘What is bad is not just that they show their bottoms,’ he complained to his wife, ‘but that they do so at the wrong times.’