Your invitation to write about Serge Prokofieff to honor his 70th Anniversary for the April issue of Sovietskaya Muzyka is accepted with pleasure, because I admire the music of Prokofieff; and with sober purpose, because the development of Prokofieff personifies, in many ways, the course of music in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Serge Prokofieff whom we knew in the United States of America was gay, witty, mercurial, full of pranks and bonheur -- and very capable as a professional musician. These qualities endeared him to both the musicians and the social economic haute monde which supported the concert world of the post World War 1, era. Prokofieff's outlook as a composer pianist conductor in America was, indeed, brilliant.

Prokofieff's Classical Symphony was hailed as an ingenious work from a naturally gifted and well trained musician still in his twenties. To the Traditionalists, it was a brilliant satire on modernism; to the Neo Classicists, it was a challenge to the pre-war world. What was it to Prokofieff? A tongue-in-cheek stylization of 18th Century ideas; a trial balloon to test the aesthetic climate of the times; a brilliant piece de resistance? Certainly its composer was an ascending star on a new world horizon.

I heard the Classical Symphony for the first time when Koussevitzky conducted it in Paris in 1927. All musical Paris was there. Some musicians were enthusiastic, some skeptical. I myself was one of the skeptics (35 years ago). I remember Ernest Bloch in the foyer, shouting in his high-pitched voice: ``it may be a tour de force, mais mon Dieu, can anyone take this music seriously?''