Sergei Prokofiev

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891, in Sontsivka, a rural estate village in the Donetsk region of what was then the Russian Empire, where his father managed the land of a wealthy landowner ^[1]. His mother, Maria, was a capable pianist who gave the boy his first lessons, and the household's isolation meant that music arrived early and without competition. He began composing at five, and by nine he had written a small opera called The Giant for performance by his family ^[2].

The scale of the child's gift persuaded his parents to seek professional opinion. In 1902 the composer Sergei Taneyev heard the boy in Moscow and recommended systematic training, which led to summer lessons with the young composer Reinhold Gliere at Sontsivka ^[1]. Gliere guided him through harmony and form while allowing the boy's appetite for writing whole operas and symphonies to run unchecked, an approach Prokofiev later credited with keeping composition a pleasure rather than a chore.

In 1904, aged thirteen, he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, arriving with a suitcase of manuscripts that startled the examiners, among them Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov ^[2]. He would remain at the Conservatory for a decade, studying composition with Anatoly Lyadov, orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov, and piano with Anna Yesipova. He was a restless and frequently arrogant student who found the official curriculum conservative, but the long training gave him a technical command that never left him.

Prokofiev announced himself to the St. Petersburg public as a pianist playing his own aggressively modern music. His First Piano Concerto, completed in 1912, divided critics with its steely brilliance, and in 1914 he performed it to win the Conservatory's Anton Rubinstein Prize, choosing his own concerto over the standard repertoire in a characteristic act of self-promotion ^[1]. Around the same period he wrote the Second Piano Concerto and the Scythian Suite, works whose percussive violence made him the enfant terrible of Russian music ^[3].

A graduation trip to London in 1914 brought a meeting that shaped his next two decades: Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, commissioned ballet music from him, beginning a relationship that later produced Chout, Le Pas d'acier, and The Prodigal Son ^[3]. During the war years Prokofiev remained in Russia, composing the opera The Gambler after Dostoevsky and, in 1917, the Classical Symphony, a compact and witty homage to Haydn that became one of his most performed works ^[2].

The revolutions of 1917 upended his prospects at home. In May 1918, with official permission to travel, he left Petrograd and crossed Siberia to Japan, then sailed on to the United States ^[1]. He did not intend the departure to be permanent, and unlike some emigres he kept his Soviet passport, a detail that mattered greatly in the years that followed.

In America Prokofiev earned his living as a touring virtuoso while pressing his case as a composer. The Chicago Opera commissioned The Love for Three Oranges, a satirical fairy-tale opera after Carlo Gozzi that premiered in Chicago in December 1921 and gave him his most durable operatic success; its march became internationally famous ^[4]. The Third Piano Concerto, completed the same year and premiered in Chicago with the composer at the keyboard, joined the small group of twentieth century concertos in permanent repertoire ^[2].

From 1923 he based himself mainly in Paris, then the capital of musical modernism, where Serge Koussevitzky championed his orchestral works and Diaghilev staged his ballets ^[3]. The Second Symphony (1925) pushed his dissonant manner to an extreme, while The Fiery Angel, an opera of obsession and demonic possession, occupied him for years without reaching the stage in his lifetime. During this period he also refined what he described as a new simplicity, a leaner lyrical style that surfaces in the Third Piano Concerto and later dominated his Soviet music.

His most widely loved works came after his return to the USSR. The ballet Romeo and Juliet, composed in 1935 and 1936, was initially rejected as undanceable but triumphed at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad in 1940 and is now among the most performed ballets in the world ^[5]. Peter and the Wolf (1936), a symphonic tale for children in which each character is voiced by a different instrument, became one of the most familiar pieces of classical music ever written ^[4]. His film collaborations with director Sergei Eisenstein produced the scores for Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible, landmarks in the history of film music ^[5]. The wartime Fifth Symphony (1944) and the Second Violin Concerto, the ballet Cinderella, and the late Seventh Piano Sonata round out a catalogue of over 130 opus numbers spanning every major genre.

Prokofiev married the Spanish-born singer Carolina Codina, who performed under the name Lina Llubera, in Ettal, Germany, in 1923. The couple had two sons, Svyatoslav and Oleg, and Lina accompanied him through the Paris years and on his gradual return to the Soviet Union ^[1]. The marriage came apart in the late 1930s after Prokofiev met Mira Mendelson, a young literature student who became his companion and collaborator on opera librettos, including War and Peace ^[6].

Prokofiev left Lina in 1941 and registered a marriage with Mendelson in 1948 after Soviet authorities ruled his foreign marriage invalid, a legal maneuver with grim consequences: within weeks Lina was arrested on charges of espionage and sentenced to twenty years in the labor camps, of which she served eight before release and eventual emigration ^[6]. The episode remains one of the darkest threads in the Prokofiev story, and scholars continue to debate how much the composer could have done to protect her.

Away from music, Prokofiev was a devoted and formidable chess player who competed against world champions Jose Raul Capablanca and Mikhail Botvinnik, once defeating Capablanca in a simultaneous exhibition in 1914 ^[2]. He was also a lifelong adherent of Christian Science, which he adopted in the 1920s, and a meticulous diarist whose journals, published decades after his death, give an unusually candid record of his ambitions and irritations ^[1].

After extended concert tours of the USSR in the early 1930s and mounting frustration with his standing in Paris, Prokofiev moved his family permanently to Moscow in 1936 ^[1]. The timing was catastrophic: the move coincided with the Great Terror and with the regime's public attack on Dmitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a warning of what official displeasure could mean. For a period Prokofiev enjoyed privileges, foreign tours, and major commissions, and works such as Alexander Nevsky and the Fifth Symphony brought him Stalin Prizes and genuine popularity ^[5].

The reckoning came in February 1948, when the Central Committee resolution on music, engineered by Andrei Zhdanov, denounced Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and other leading composers for formalism, meaning music judged too dissonant and inaccessible for the Soviet public ^[7]. Performances of many of his works were curtailed, his income collapsed, and his opera The Story of a Real Man was rejected after a closed audition. The same year brought Lina's arrest. Prokofiev, already weakened by a fall and by chronic hypertension after a stroke in 1945, spent his final years in declining health, working under medical orders that limited him to an hour or two of composition a day ^[6].

He continued writing to the end, completing the Seventh Symphony in 1952, a work of autumnal clarity that won a posthumous Lenin Prize, and revising the ballet The Stone Flower ^[2]. He died of a brain hemorrhage in Moscow on March 5, 1953, about an hour before the death of Joseph Stalin was recorded. The coincidence meant his passing went almost unreported for days, and mourners struggled even to obtain flowers for his funeral because the city's supply had been requisitioned for Stalin's ^[7].

Any Sergei Prokofiev biography has to reckon with a double reputation: the steel-fingered modernist of the 1910s and the melodist whose tunes from Romeo and Juliet and Peter and the Wolf are recognized by people who never enter a concert hall. That range is the core of his achievement. His seven symphonies, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, nine piano sonatas, and a dozen operas and ballets give him one of the broadest catalogues of any twentieth century composer, and works like the Third Piano Concerto and the Fifth Symphony are fixtures of orchestral programming worldwide ^[2].

His influence runs through several channels. Pianists prize the sonatas, especially the three so-called War Sonatas of the early 1940s, for their combination of percussive attack and long lyric line ^[4]. Choreographers return constantly to Romeo and Juliet, whose Dance of the Knights has crossed into film, television, and sport arenas ^[5]. Film composers cite the Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible scores as founding documents of the symphonic soundtrack. Peter and the Wolf remains a standard first encounter with the orchestra for children across the world.

Scholarship since the opening of Soviet archives, including the publication of his diaries and Simon Morrison's research on his Soviet decades, has sharpened the picture of a composer who was neither a regime loyalist nor a straightforward victim, but an artist who gambled that he could work on his own terms inside a system that ultimately allowed no such thing ^[6]. Among Sergei Prokofiev facts that endure, the strangest is the date of his death, forever shadowed by Stalin's. The music has long since escaped that shadow.