SergeiProkofiev

At Sontsovka, the Ukrainian estate his father managed, Prokofiev grew up hearing his mother play Beethoven and Chopin. She wrote down his first piano pieces; the earliest, an Indian Galop, dates from 1896. After a trip to the Moscow opera in 1900, the eight-year-old set about writing an opera of his own, The Giant, for the family to perform at home. His mother eventually stopped playing when she saw that he had overtaken her. Sergei Taneyev recommended proper lessons, and Reinhold Glière spent the summers of 1902 and 1903 at Sontsovka teaching the boy, who was already filling manuscript books.

1904–⁠14The St Petersburg Conservatory

He entered the St Petersburg Conservatory at thirteen, bringing four operas, two sonatas, a symphony and piano pieces to the entrance examination. Rimsky-⁠Korsakov taught orchestration, Lyadov harmony and counterpoint; later Anna Esipova took charge of his piano playing. Nikolai Tcherepnin taught conducting and encouraged his taste for Haydn and Mozart. His fellow student Nikolai Myaskovsky became the friend to whom he sent scores and complaints for the rest of his life. In December 1908 Prokofiev played some of his first distinctive pieces, Suggestion diabolique among them, at St Petersburg’s Evenings of Contemporary Music. The following spring his examination pieces shocked Lyadov, who heard Scriabin in them. In the final piano competition of 1914, with Esipova ill, Prokofiev played his own First Concerto. Glazunov opposed him, but Prokofiev was awarded the Rubinstein Prize, which was a grand piano.

The Second Concerto had caused an uproar at Pavlovsk the previous year. It has an enormous first-movement cadenza, after which the orchestra re-enters loudly. The score was later lost, and Prokofiev reconstructed and revised it in 1923. In the Toccata, Op. 11, repeated notes are exchanged between the hands, with scarcely a moment to lift the fingers clear.

1914–⁠17Diaghilev, Chout and the Classical Symphony

In London in 1914 he met Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned a prehistoric ballet and then rejected it. Prokofiev reworked Ala and Lolli as the Scythian Suite, scored for large forces of brass and percussion. When he conducted it in Petrograd in 1916, Glazunov walked out just before the end. Diaghilev, whom Prokofiev had travelled to Italy to see in 1915, commissioned another ballet, this time on a Russian folk tale, Chout (The Buffoon). That year Prokofiev met Stravinsky for the second time and played a four-hand Petrushka with him. After extensive revision Chout, a ballet built on a succession of practical jokes, reached Paris in 1921.

1918–⁠29America, Chicago and Paris

With official permission to leave Russia, he travelled east in May 1918, through Siberia and Japan to San Francisco. In America he found more engagements as a pianist than productions of his operas. In New York he met the singer Lina Codina, who performed as Lina Llubera; she thought him “vaingloriously rude” and told him so. Cleofonte Campanini commissioned The Love for Three Oranges for Chicago, and Prokofiev had the score ready in October 1919, despite scarlet fever and diphtheria that spring. Campanini died that December, and the production was postponed to the end of 1921. Prokofiev conducted it in Chicago on 30 December 1921, in French. The opera concerns a melancholy prince, a witch and three oranges containing princesses, with rival theatrical factions quarrelling at the edges of the action.

Two weeks earlier he had played the Third Piano Concerto in Chicago under Frederick Stock. It opens with a solo clarinet; the strings then enter with a fast run, and the piano comes in across it. He had worked on it that summer in Brittany, where the poet Konstantin Balmont was staying nearby; Prokofiev dedicated the concerto to him and set five of his poems. In 1932 he recorded it in London with the London Symphony Orchestra under Piero Coppola. After a stay at Ettal in Bavaria, he married Lina in 1923 and settled in Paris. Their sons, Sviatoslav and Oleg, were born in 1924 and 1928; Prokofiev’s mother died in December 1924.

Serge Koussevitzky promoted the music, though Prokofiev’s gratitude had limits. “You can’t rely on Koussevitzky’s taste,” he wrote to Myaskovsky from Sèvres on 3 January 1924, “though you can’t deny him a nose for things.” The heavily scored Second Symphony disappointed Paris in 1925. That August Prokofiev told Myaskovsky that everyone had been puzzled: “so clever had I been that even I could not fathom what I was driving at.” Diaghilev’s Le Pas d’acier, staged in 1927, put Soviet factory life into a ballet. Diaghilev then commissioned The Prodigal Son and was amazed when Prokofiev finished it in a few months. After clashes with the choreographer, George Balanchine, it reached the stage in 1929, and Diaghilev died soon afterwards. The Fiery Angel was not staged; a Berlin production under Bruno Walter was cancelled in 1927. Prokofiev used music from it in his Third Symphony.

1927–⁠38Return to the Soviet Union

A successful Soviet tour in 1927, with recitals in Moscow, Leningrad and the Ukraine, began the gradual return. In 1934 he wrote in Izvestia for a “new simplicity” in melody and form. Commissions multiplied; he moved his family to Moscow in 1936 and continued travelling abroad until 1938. One early commission was the film Lieutenant Kijé, whose officer exists through a clerk’s mistake. Prokofiev’s concert suite gives this imaginary man a birth, a romance, a wedding, a troika and a funeral. The scoring includes a tenor saxophone, and sleigh bells accompany the troika.

In 1936 Natalia Sats asked him for a children’s piece. Peter and the Wolf gives the grandfather to the bassoon and the wolf to three horns. In 1938, on his last tour of the West, Prokofiev met Walt Disney in Hollywood and was offered $2,500 a week to write music for a film studio. At home he worked with Sergei Eisenstein on Alexander Nevsky. Sometimes Prokofiev composed to filmed scenes, and sometimes Eisenstein filmed to his music. Prokofiev also experimented with microphones. The two men agreed to leave out genuine medieval music, which Prokofiev thought “far too remote and emotionally alien to us” for a film audience. For the 1939 cantata he rebuilt the score. In The Field of the Dead a mezzo-soprano searches the battlefield.

1939–⁠45War sonatas and War and Peace

In 1939 Prokofiev met Mira in the Caucasian town of Kislovodsk. That July Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was to direct Prokofiev’s Soviet opera Semyon Kotko, was arrested; he was executed the following year. In 1941 Prokofiev left Lina for the writer Mira Mendelson. Evacuated after the German invasion, they worked in Nalchik, Tbilisi and Alma-⁠Ata. Together they made a libretto from War and Peace, beginning with Prince Andrei overhearing Natasha at her window. Official demands enlarged the patriotic scenes. In 1946 the revised first half had a triumphant staging at Leningrad’s Maly Theatre under Samosud. The second half reached dress rehearsal in 1947 and was withdrawn after official criticism and Prokofiev’s refusal to cut the scenes at issue. Cinderella, completed in 1944, reached the Bolshoi in November 1945; in it the waltzes are interrupted by the arrival of midnight.

Prokofiev conducted the Fifth Symphony in Moscow on 13 January 1945, when the defeat of Germany was close; it was his last appearance as a conductor. The symphony opens with flute and bassoon in octaves. Near the end of the finale the full orchestra drops to solo strings, piano, harp and percussion before the closing chords. The manuscript was written on paper that Koussevitzky had sent from Boston to help Soviet composers. Soon after the première Prokofiev fainted, fell and suffered a concussion. His health never recovered.

1948–⁠53The 1948 resolution on formalism

Prokofiev’s work and friendship with the young Mstislav Rostropovich led to the Cello Sonata of 1949 and then the Sinfonia concertante, remade from his earlier Cello Concerto. In 1951 Richter gave the first performance of the Ninth Sonata; Prokofiev, nearly sixty, heard it by telephone, relayed from the Union of Composers. The Seventh Symphony, written for a children’s radio audience in 1952, ends quietly; Prokofiev also supplied a brisk alternative coda. Samosud conducted it that October, and Prokofiev made his last appearance in a concert hall. He died on 5 March 1953, the day Stalin died. The Fiery Angel and the complete War and Peace had not yet been staged. Lina was still in a camp. She was released in 1956, left the Soviet Union in 1974 and died in 1989.