Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev ( – 5 March 1953) was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor who later worked in the Soviet Union. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous music genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His works include such widely heard pieces as the March from The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet—from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken—and Peter and the Wolf. Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created—excluding juvenilia—seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, a cello concerto, a symphony-concerto for cello and orchestra, and nine completed piano sonatas.
A graduate of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev initially made his name as an iconoclastic composer-pianist, achieving notoriety with a series of ferociously dissonant and virtuosic works for his instrument, including his first two piano concertos. In 1915, Prokofiev made a decisive break from the standard composer-pianist category with his orchestral Scythian Suite, compiled from music originally composed for a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev commissioned three further ballets from Prokofiev—Chout, Le pas d'acier and The Prodigal Son—which, at the time of their original production, all caused a sensation among both critics and colleagues. But Prokofiev's greatest interest was opera, and he composed several works in that genre, including The Gambler and The Fiery Angel. Prokofiev's one operatic success during his lifetime was The Love for Three Oranges, composed for the Chicago Opera and performed over the following decade in Europe and Russia.
After the Revolution of 1917, Prokofiev left Russia with the approval of Soviet People's Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, and resided in the United States, then Germany, then Paris, making his living as a composer, pianist and conductor. In 1923 he married a Spanish singer, Carolina (Lina) Codina, with whom he had two sons; they divorced in 1947. In the early 1930s, the Great Depression diminished opportunities for Prokofiev's ballets and operas to be staged in America and Western Europe. Prokofiev, who regarded himself as a composer foremost, resented the time taken by touring as a pianist, and increasingly turned to the Soviet Union for commissions of new music; in 1936, he finally returned to his homeland with his family. His greatest Soviet successes included Lieutenant Kijé, Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Alexander Nevsky, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, On Guard for Peace, and the Piano Sonatas Nos. 6–8.
The Nazi invasion of the USSR spurred Prokofiev to compose his most ambitious work, an operatic version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace; he co-wrote the libretto with Mira Mendelson, his longtime companion and later second wife. In 1948, Prokofiev was attacked for producing "anti-democratic formalism". Nevertheless, he enjoyed personal and artistic support from a new generation of Russian performers, notably Sviatoslav Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich: he wrote his Ninth Piano Sonata for the former and his Symphony-Concerto for the latter.
Life and career
Childhood and first compositions
thumb|Prokofiev, aged 9, with the score of his opera [[The Giant (opera)|The Giant]]
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was born on at a rural estate in Sontsovka, a village then in the Bakhmut uezd of the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire and now in the Pokrovsk Raion of the Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine. His father, Sergei Alekseyevich Prokofiev, was an agronomist from a mercantile family in Moscow. Prokofiev's mother, Maria (), came from a Saint Petersburg family of former serfs who had been owned by the Sheremetev family, under whose patronage serf-children were taught theatre and arts from an early age. She was described by Reinhold Glière, Prokofiev's first composition teacher, as "a tall woman with beautiful, clever eyes … who knew how to create an atmosphere of warmth and simplicity about her." After their wedding in the summer of 1877, the Prokofievs moved to a small estate in the Smolensk governorate. Eventually, Sergei Alekseyevich found employment as a soil engineer, employed by one of his former fellow-students, Dmitri Sontsov, to whose estate in the Ukrainian steppes the Prokofievs moved.
By the time of Prokofiev's birth, Maria—having previously lost two daughters—had devoted her life to music; during her son's early childhood, she spent two months a year in Moscow or St Petersburg taking piano lessons. Sergei Prokofiev was inspired by hearing his mother practicing the piano in the evenings, mostly works by Chopin and Beethoven, and wrote his first piano composition at the age of five, an "Indian Gallop", which was written down by his mother: it was in the F Lydian mode (a major scale with a raised 4th scale degree), as the young Prokofiev felt "reluctance to tackle the black notes". By seven, he had also learned to play chess. Chess remained a passion of his, and he became acquainted with world chess champions José Raúl Capablanca, whom he beat in a simultaneous exhibition match in 1914, and Mikhail Botvinnik, with whom he played several matches in the 1930s. At the age of nine, he composed his first opera, The Giant, as well as an overture and various other pieces. Opera remained thereafter as the genre Prokofiev was most fond of working in.
Education and early works
thumb|upright|Composer [[Reinhold Glière, Prokofiev's first composition teacher]]
In 1902, Prokofiev's mother met Sergei Taneyev, director of the Moscow Conservatory, who initially suggested that Prokofiev should start lessons in piano and composition with Alexander Goldenweiser. Unable to arrange that, Taneyev instead arranged for composer and pianist Reinhold Glière to spend the summer of 1902 in Sontsovka teaching Prokofiev. The following summer, Glière revisited Sontsovka to give further tuition. Nonetheless, equipped with the necessary theoretical tools, Prokofiev started experimenting with dissonant harmonies and unusual time signatures in a series of short piano pieces he called "ditties" (after the so-called "song form", more accurately ternary form, on which they were based), laying the basis for his own musical style.
Despite his growing talent, Prokofiev's parents hesitated over starting their son on a musical career at such an early age, and considered the possibility of his attending a good high school in Moscow. By 1904, his mother had decided instead on Saint Petersburg, and she and Prokofiev visited the then capital to explore the possibility of moving there for his education. They were introduced to composer Alexander Glazunov, a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, who asked to see Prokofiev and his music; Prokofiev had composed two more operas, Desert Islands and The Feast during the Plague, and was working on his fourth, Undina. Glazunov was so impressed that he urged Prokofiev's mother to have her son apply for admission to the Conservatory. He passed the introductory tests and enrolled that year.
Several years younger than most of his class, Prokofiev was viewed as eccentric and arrogant and annoyed a number of his classmates by keeping statistics on their errors. During that period, he studied under, among others, Alexander Winkler for piano, Anatoly Lyadov for harmony and counterpoint, Nikolai Tcherepnin for conducting, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for orchestration (though when Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908, Prokofiev noted that he had only studied with him "after a fashion"—he was just one of many students in a heavily attended class—and regretted that he otherwise "never had the opportunity to study with him"). He also shared classes with the composers Boris Asafyev and Nikolai Myaskovsky, the latter becoming a close and lifelong friend.
left|thumb|[[Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1913]]
As a member of the Saint Petersburg music scene, Prokofiev developed a reputation as a musical rebel, while getting praise for his original compositions, which he performed himself on the piano. In 1909, he graduated from his class in composition with unimpressive marks. He continued at the Conservatory, studying piano under Anna Yesipova and continuing his conducting lessons under Tcherepnin.
In 1910, Prokofiev's father died and Sergei's financial support ceased. Fortunately, he had started making a name for himself as a composer and pianist outside the Conservatory, making appearances at the St Petersburg Evenings of Contemporary Music. There he performed several of his more adventurous piano works, such as his highly chromatic and dissonant Etudes, Op. 2 (1909). His performance of it impressed the organisers of the Evenings sufficiently for them to invite Prokofiev to give the Russian premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11. Prokofiev's harmonic experimentation continued with Sarcasms for piano, Op. 17 (1912), which makes extensive use of polytonality. He composed his first two piano concertos around then, the latter of which caused a scandal at its premiere (23 August 1913, Pavlovsk). According to one account, the audience left the hall with exclamations of "'To hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!'", but the modernists were in rapture.
In 1911, help arrived from renowned Russian musicologist and critic Alexander Ossovsky, who wrote a supportive letter to music publisher Boris P. Jurgenson (son of publishing-firm founder Peter Jurgenson [1836–1904]); thus a contract was offered to the composer. Prokofiev made his first foreign trip in 1913, travelling to Paris and London where he first encountered Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
First ballets
thumb|Sketch of the costume for the ballet [[Chout, 1916]]
In 1914, Prokofiev finished his career at the Conservatory by entering the 'battle of the pianos', a competition open to the five best piano students for which the prize was a Schroeder grand piano; Prokofiev won by performing his own Piano Concerto No. 1.
Soon afterwards, he journeyed to London where he made contact with the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev commissioned Prokofiev's first ballet, Ala and Lolli; but when Prokofiev brought the work in progress to him in Italy in 1915 he rejected it as "non-Russian". Urging Prokofiev to write "music that was national in character", Diaghilev then commissioned the ballet Chout ("The Buffoon"). (The original Russian-language full title was Сказка про шута, семерых шутов перешутившего, meaning "The Tale of the Buffoon who Outwits Seven Other Buffoons".) Under Diaghilev's guidance, Prokofiev chose his subject from a collection of folk tales by the ethnographer Alexander Afanasyev; the story, concerning a buffoon and a series of confidence tricks, had been previously suggested to Diaghilev by Igor Stravinsky as a possible subject for a ballet, and Diaghilev and his choreographer Léonide Massine helped Prokofiev to shape it into a ballet scenario. Prokofiev's inexperience with ballet led him to revise the work extensively in the 1920s, following Diaghilev's detailed critique, prior to its first production.
The ballet's premiere in Paris on 17 May 1921 was a huge success and was greeted with great admiration by an audience that included Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel. Stravinsky called the ballet "the single piece of modern music he could listen to with pleasure", while Ravel called it "a work of genius".
First World War and Revolution
thumb|upright|Prokofiev c. 1918
During World War I, Prokofiev returned to the Conservatory and studied organ to avoid conscription. In 1916, he debuted his Toccata. Shortly after this he composed The Gambler based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name, but rehearsals were plagued by problems, and the scheduled 1917 première had to be cancelled because of the February Revolution. In the summer of that year, Prokofiev composed his first symphony, the Classical. The name was Prokofiev's own; the music is in a style that, according to Prokofiev, Joseph Haydn would have used if he were alive at the time. The music is more or less Classical in style but incorporates more modern musical elements (see Neoclassicism).
The symphony was also an exact contemporary of Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 19, which was scheduled to premiere in November 1917. The first performances of both works had to wait until 21 April 1918 and 18 October 1923, respectively. Prokofiev stayed briefly with his mother in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus.
After completing the score of Seven, They Are Seven, a "Chaldean invocation" for chorus and orchestra, Prokofiev was "left with nothing to do and time hung heavily on [his] hands". Believing that Russia "had no use for music at the moment", Prokofiev decided to try his fortunes in America until the turmoil in his homeland had passed. He set out for Moscow and Petersburg in March 1918 to sort out financial matters and to arrange for his passport. In May, he headed for the US, having obtained official permission to do so from Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar for Education, who told him: "You are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in life. We ought to work together. But if you want to go to America I shall not stand in your way."
Life abroad
thumb|316x316px|Prokofiev's opera [[The Love for Three Oranges at the Théâtre du Capitole, 1971]]
Arriving in San Francisco after having been released from questioning by immigration officials on Angel Island on 11 August 1918, Prokofiev was soon compared to other famous Russian exiles, such as Sergei Rachmaninoff. His debut solo concert in New York led to several further engagements. He also received a contract from the music director of the Chicago Opera Association, Cleofonte Campanini, for the production of his new opera The Love for Three Oranges, but due to Campanini's illness and death, the premiere was postponed. The delay was another example of Prokofiev's bad luck in operatic matters. The failure also cost him his American solo career since the opera took too much time and effort. He soon found himself in financial difficulties, and in April 1920, he left for Paris, not wanting to return to Russia as a failure.
In Paris, Prokofiev reaffirmed his contacts with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also completed some of his older, unfinished works, such as his Third Piano Concerto. The Love for Three Oranges finally premièred in Chicago, under the composer's baton, on 30 December 1921. Diaghilev became sufficiently interested in the opera to request Prokofiev play the vocal score to him in June 1922, while they were both in Paris for a revival of Chout, so he could consider it for a possible production. When he then accused Prokofiev of "wasting time composing operas", Prokofiev retorted that Stravinsky "was in no position to lay down a general artistic direction, since he is himself not immune to error". According to Prokofiev, Stravinsky "became incandescent with rage" and "we almost came to blows and were separated only with difficulty". before moving back to Paris.
In Paris, several of his works, including the Second Symphony, were performed, but their reception was lukewarm and Prokofiev sensed that he "was evidently no longer a sensation". Still, the Symphony appeared to prompt Diaghilev to commission Le pas d'acier (The Steel Step), a "modernist" ballet score intended to portray the industrialisation of the Soviet Union. It was enthusiastically received by Parisian audiences and critics.
Around 1924, Prokofiev was introduced to Christian Science. He began to practice its teachings, which he believed to be beneficial to his health and to his fiery temperament and to which he remained faithful for the rest of his life, according to biographer Simon Morrison.
Prokofiev and Stravinsky restored their friendship, though Prokofiev particularly disliked Stravinsky's "stylization of Bach" in such recent works as the Octet and the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments. For his part, Stravinsky described Prokofiev as the greatest Russian composer of his day, after himself.
First visits to the Soviet Union
thumb|[[Sergei Diaghilev in 1916]]
Prokofiev met Boris Krasin in the violinist Joseph Szigeti's Paris apartment in 1924. In 1927, Prokofiev made his first concert tour in the Soviet Union. Over more than two months, he spent time in Moscow and Leningrad (as St Petersburg had been renamed), where he enjoyed a very successful staging of The Love for Three Oranges in the Mariinsky Theatre. In 1928, Prokofiev completed his Third Symphony, which was broadly based on his unperformed opera The Fiery Angel. The conductor Serge Koussevitzky characterized the Third as "the greatest symphony since Tchaikovsky's Sixth".
In the meantime, under the influence of the teachings of Christian Science, Prokofiev had turned against the expressionist style and the subject matter of The Fiery Angel. He now preferred what he called a "new simplicity", which he found more sincere than the "contrivances and complexities" of so much modern music of the 1920s. In 1928–29, Prokofiev composed his last ballet for Diaghilev, The Prodigal Son. When first staged in Paris on 21 May 1929, choreographed by George Balanchine with Serge Lifar in the title role, the audience and critics were particularly struck by the final scene, in which the prodigal son drags himself across the stage on his knees to be welcomed by his father. Diaghilev had recognised that in the music to the scene, Prokofiev had "never been more clear, more simple, more melodious, and more tender". Only months later, Diaghilev died.
That summer, Prokofiev completed the Divertimento, Op. 43 (which he had started in 1925) and revised his Sinfonietta, Op. 5/48, a work started in his days at the Conservatory.