Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeyevich 1891-1953
Russian composer

Prokofiev was born in Sontsovka in the Ukraine. He was taught the piano by his mother, and studied with Gli�re from 1902, by which time he had already composed two operas. He entered the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1904, and remained there for 10 years, studying with Anatoli Liadov and Rimsky-Korsakov, and forming a lifelong friendship with Nikolai Myaskovsky. His compositions of this period, including his first two piano concertos and two piano sonatas, caused a furore among teachers and critics.

In 1914 he visited London, where he heard Stravinsky's music and met Sergei Diaghilev. He returned to St Petersburg and avoided war service by again enrolling at the Conservatory. There he completed his opera The Gambler, the third and fourth piano sonatas, the Classical symphony (a revival of the musical world of Haydn) and the first of two violin concertos. In May 1918 he left Russia, intending to return when political circumstances were more favourable to the performance of new music. In fact, he remained in exile for 18 years. In the USA he enjoyed success as a pianist, especially of his own works, and had The Love for Three Oranges staged by Mary Garden at the Chicago Opera. In 1920 he moved to Paris, where he completed another opera, The Fiery Angel (1927), as well as a second version of The Gambler (Brussels, 1929), a fifth piano sonata, a cantata called We are Seven, the second, third and fourth symphonies, the fourth and fifth piano concertos, and (for Diaghilev) a ballet entitled The Prodigal Son.

All this time Prokofiev kept in touch with musical life in the USSR, to which he continued to feel emotionally and spiritually drawn. He had several premi�res there and toured regularly from 1927. Finally, in 1936, he settled again in Moscow, unfortunately coinciding with the emergence of 'social realism' as the political doctrine for the arts. His principal musical outlets proved to be ballet (Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella) and film scores (for Sergei Eisenstein, including Lieutenant Kij� and Alexander Nevsky, which was first written for Hollywood and later recast as a dramatic cantata), as well as the fifth, sixth and seventh symphonies, the sixth to ninth piano sonatas, a fifth piano concerto, and a 'children's piece', Peter and the Wolf (1936). In 1941 he began work on the opera generally considered his greatest, War and Peace.

From this time the USSR became more and more isolated artistically from the West. Prokofiev made his last visit to western Europe and the USA in 1938; in 1939 he wrote a cantata Hail to Stalin, and when the USSR entered World War II in 1941, his health declined progressively because of a heart condition. From 1941 he became estranged from his first wife (who was sent to labour camps from 1948) and lived with Mira Mendelson, who wrote the texts for several late works. In 1948 he was included among those named by the Communist Party Central Committee as composers of music 'marked with formalist perversions' and 'alien to the Soviet people'. His last opera, The Story of a Real Man, was judged to be unsuitable by the Union of Composers, and was performed only after Stalin died, coincidentally on the same day as Prokofiev - 5 March 1953.

Bibliography: Prokofiev's own reminiscences are collected in Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer's Memoir (translated by Guy Daniels, 1979). See also D Gutman, Prokofiev (1988); H Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev (1984); Victor Seroff, Prokofiev: A Soviet Tragedy (1968); I V Nestev, Prokofiev (1960). In 1989 a manuscript was discovered that described Prokofiev's 1927 visit to Russia; this was published in an English translation by O Prokofiev and C Palmer, Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings (1991).