Serge Prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev was born on 23 April 1891 (11 April by the old calendar) at Sontsovka, a village in present-day Ukraine, then in the Russian Empire, where his father, an agronomist, managed a large estate. His mother, Maria, an excellent pianist, taught him the piano and played him Beethoven and Chopin. An only child, he was extremely precocious: at five he composed a little “Indian Galop”; at nine he wrote an opera, The Giant. The composer Reinhold Glière spent two summers on the estate giving him lessons.

In 1904, aged thirteen, he entered the St Petersburg Conservatory, much younger than his classmates. He studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and Anatoly Lyadov but was insolent and provocative: he kept count of his fellow students’ mistakes and loved to shock with his dissonances and hammered rhythms. A formidable pianist, he composed percussive pieces such as the Toccata Op. 11 (1912). In 1914 he won the Anton Rubinstein Prize playing his own Piano Concerto No. 1. That same year he beat the chess champion Capablanca in a simultaneous exhibition.

In 1917 he composed his Symphony No. 1, the “Classical”, a nod to Haydn, written as if Haydn had lived in the twentieth century: short, light and full of humour. After the October Revolution he obtained permission to go abroad. In 1918 he crossed Siberia and Japan to reach the United States. There he made a career as a pianist and composed the opera The Love for Three Oranges, premiered in Chicago in 1921, the story of a prince who has forgotten how to laugh, whose famous March became very popular.

In 1923 he settled in Paris, where he married the Spanish singer Lina Codina, with whom he had two sons. He composed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and pursued an international career as a pianist. But he felt far from his homeland. From 1927 he made several triumphant tours of the Soviet Union, and in 1936 he decided to return to Moscow for good with his family, at a time when Stalin’s regime was forcing artists to serve the official ideology.

That same year, 1936, the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow commissioned a work to introduce young people to the instruments of the orchestra. In a few days he wrote Peter and the Wolf, a musical tale in which each character is represented by an instrument: Peter by the strings, the bird by the flute, the duck by the oboe, the cat by the clarinet, the grandfather by the bassoon, the wolf by the horns and the hunters by the timpani. It is now one of the most performed children’s works in the world.

He then composed the ballet Romeo and Juliet (premiered in 1938), with the famous Dance of the Knights, the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky (1938), and during the Second World War the opera War and Peace, after Tolstoy, the Symphony No. 5 (1944), celebrating “the grandeur of the human spirit”, and the ballet Cinderella (1945). He separated from Lina and lived with the young writer Mira Mendelson, whom he married in 1948.

In 1948 the Soviet authorities officially condemned several composers, including Prokofiev and Shostakovich, for “formalism” — music deemed too modern and remote from the people. His works were banned, his income collapsed, and his first wife, Lina, was arrested and sent to a labour camp in Siberia. Ill, Prokofiev still composed his Symphony No. 7 (1952). He died in Moscow on 5 March 1953, the same day as Stalin: news of his death went almost unnoticed, and it was hard to find flowers for his funeral.