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 Sergey Prokofiev, composer, conductor and pianist, seemed to move through life with an irony as playful as his music and as tragic as his career. His compositions demonstrate an amazing range of style, stretching from Russian folk to ultramodern, from simple nursery rhymes to politically charged musical commentaries. However, while children worldwide may hear his Peter and the Wolf theme during Saturday morning cartoons, his proletarian operas and Stalinist tone poems often go unheard. With a body of work so far-reaching and so inextricably linked to Soviet politics, Prokofiev remains one of the most challenging musical figures of the twentieth century.
Prokofiev was born into an affluent Ukraine household on April 23 (April 11, Old Style), 1891. His father was a leading agricultural engineer, and his mother was a well-educated music lover and talented pianist. As an only child, Prokofiev quickly learned to impress his parents with his seemingly instinctual gift for piano playing. Considered the prodigal son of the family, by his eleventh birthday Prokofiev had written two short operas and overfilled a portfolio with short piano manuscripts.
Prokofiev’s innate abilities needed some sculpting, though. In September 1905, the 14 year-old Prokofiev enrolled in the prestigious St. Petersburg Conservatory. Here he spent 10 years, studying composition, piano, and finally conducting. Under each successive teacher he had, the ambitious and challenging student nurtured a well-crafted reputation as an enfant terrible. This attitude was unfurled in his first public performances, where critics called his short piano pieces "ultramodern" and "unintelligible." The response was precisely what Prokofiev expected, for even early in his career, he wrote to confound, to juxtapose the mechanistic workings of the piano with the romantic, gesturing muse of the tone-poet. Toward the end of his studies, Prokofiev finally found his match in his last and best teacher, Nikolay Tcherepnin, who offered guidance to Prokofiev during the composition of early irony-laden pastoral works like the symphonic poems, Dreams and Autumn Sketch, and the bold opera, The Fiery Angel. While at conservatory, Prokofiev also wrote his first two piano concerti, the one-movement Concerto in D Flat Major (1911) and the four-movement Concerto in G Minor (1913).
Prokofiev’s career as a composer took off in the years preceding World War I. He traveled to Paris and London, where he was warmly welcomed by the celebrated Ballets Russes company, which included composer Igor Stravinsky and artistic impresario Serge Diaghilev. Through his association with Stravinsky, Prokofiev learned to infuse folk melodies and rhythms of Eastern Europe into more traditional western idioms. This influence is most notable in The Tale of the Buffoon (1915), a witty ballet commissioned by Diaghilev and based on a folktale. As is frequently the case, though, the second iteration of this Russian folk style was never as critically successful as the first, and Prokofiev lived out much of his life in the shadow of the more popular Stravinsky.
With the onset of the cataclysmic 1917 Russian Revolution, Prokofiev moved to the United States, where he was quickly indoctrinated into the capitalist-driven market of classical music. Reeling in enthusiasm, he was quickly contracted to write a new opera, The Love for Three Oranges (1919). For the first time in his life, however, the prolific composer was struck with writer's block. After dropping all other obligations to focus on The Love for Three Oranges, finances grew tight and, "with a thousand dollars in my pocket and an aching head," Prokofiev returned to Paris to re-find his muse. There, he completed his Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major (1921). He left shortly thereafter, though, for Southern Germany, where he spent over a year and a half in the Bavarian Alps.
In the fall of 1923, Prokofiev returned to Paris. The years spent there, from 1923 to 1936, were some of Prokofiev's most productive. He overhauled the tragic The Fiery Angel, and he composed Symphony No. 2 in D Minor, the constructivist-inspired, multimedia piece Le Pas d’Acier (The Steel Step), the jarring Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, and The Prodigal Son ballet. Also in this period of fierce creativity and post-revolutionary acclaim, Prokofiev married Lina Llubera, a Spanish-born opera singer whom the composer originally met in America. The couple had two sons, Svyatoslav and Oleg.
After experiencing a swift but complex transition from composer to celebrity (not to mention from enfant terrible to dedicated father), Prokofiev returned to his homeland to participate in edifying the working class peasantry. The Russia he found during the tense pre-war period of 1936, however, bore little resemblance to the one he had left nearly 20 years earlier. The Ministry of Culture had recently advised composers to "pay heed to the social content of their music and its appeal to the people at large; as a basis for their idiom they might look to the traditions of the past and to folk resources within the country." In other words, what had once been a stylistic decision for composers like Stravinsky and Prokofiev several years prior had now become mandated ideology. Uncertain about how to maintain the integrity of his work under the restrictive Stalinist regime, Prokofiev retreated into brief obscurity, writing smaller works for his two young children. In this period, he composed the short opera without words, Peter and the Wolf, which eventually became a canonized teaching tool for first-time listeners of classical music (at the time, though, the piece was rarely performed).
1938 marks the beginning of a long end for Prokofiev. His social realist piece entitled Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution fell on deaf ears in Moscow. Then, in 1940, Prokofiev began a passionate affair with Mira Mendelson, a recent graduate from the Moscow Literary Institute. While the true details of the ensuing break-up with Lina remain unclear, Lina, a foreigner in wartime Moscow, was soon arrested on charges of espionage and sent to a labor camp. With the outbreak of World War II in 1941, Prokofiev suffered the first of several debilitating heart attacks and moved to the countryside alongside Mira without his beloved children. After revising some of his major works to remain in good graces with the government, Prokofiev collaborated with filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein to write several soundtracks. In 1945, Prokofiev made his last public appearance on stage in Moscow, premiering the majestic Symphony No. 5 in B Flat Major. Soon after, he suffered a major concussion that would plague him for the rest of his life. In 1948, the Kremlin banned much of Prokofiev's work, citing it as "marked with formalist perversions alien to the Soviet people." In 1952, he moved back to Moscow to be closer to his doctors, and on March 5, 1953, Sergey Prokofiev died of a brain hemorrhage in his home. Josef Stalin died later that same day.
In some ways, the Kremlin’s ban on Prokofiev’s work proved an appropriate ending point for Prokofiev, the "unintelligible ultramodern" ironist and steely enfant terrible. Although he is considered one of the most important composers of the twentieth century, he possessed a greatness forever overshadowed by the politics of the time. As poetic justice would have it, though, Prokofiev ultimately transcended politics and even stylistics by being remembered most strongly for his simple children’s piece about a walk in the woods.
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