Some unusual biographical and æsthetic interest may attach to a few manuscripts existing in the archives of the Paris office of Prokofieff's publishers. More than most composers, Prokofieff had the habit of revising and re-arranging his early compositions, and as in the new versions much of the original texture generally survived, he obviously attributed their original failure to corrigible technical shortcomings while continuing to believe in the maturity of his conception. Of the works here in question, the two short symphonic poems Rêves (Op. 6) and Esquisse Automnale (Op. 8), Le Cygne Blanc and Les Vagues (Op. 7) for female chorus and orchestra and the operas Magdalena (Op. 13) and The Flaming Angel (Op. 37), all but the last were written between 1909 and 1912, that is to say, before he left Russia for the first time. It is unlikely that in the circumstances of his hurried and unplanned departure he would have taken these scores with him and we may rather assume that he found them again, like the manuscript of The Gambler, when he first returned therein 1927. He then brought them back to Paris to re-write them there. This is all the more probable as the Sinfonietta, originally Op. 5 composed in 1909, the manuscript of which may have belonged to the same batch, actually appeared in Paris in a revised version in 1929 as Op. 48. Esquisse Automnale was re-arranged shortly before Prokofieff's definite return to Russia in 1934 and as there is much evidence of his intention to continue to visit the western world, the fact that these manuscripts remained in Paris does not mean that he wished to abandon them.
