Sergei Prokofiev
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Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (b. Sontsovka, Ukraine 23 April 1891; d. Moscow 5 March 1953) was a Russian composer and pianist who came from the Ukraine. Together with Dmitri Shostakovich he belongs to the greatest Russian composers of the 20th century. Children all over the world love to listen to his musical story Peter and the Wolf and the music for Lieutenant Kije, but he wrote many other great works including symphonies, concertos, piano sonatas, ballets and operas.
[change] Early life
Prokofiev was born into a family who had plenty of money. His father owned a lot of land in the Ukrainian steppe. His mother played the piano very well. The young Sergei started composing at a very early age. By the time he was eleven he had written two operas and lots of short piano pieces. Soon he was writing music with unusual time signatures and in unusual changes of key.
In 1904 he went to study at the Conservatory in St Petersburg. He was a brilliant student, but he often disagreed with the way the professors were teaching. He was bored with the lessons in orchestration from Rimsky-Korsakov and the counterpoint lessons from Liadov although he could have learned a lot from these great men. His main friends were the composers Nikolai Myaskovsky and Boris Asafiev. He often showed them his latest piano compositions which sounded very modern. The newspaper critics did not like his music.
Prokofiev spent the summer of 1909 back at home in the Ukraine. He worked in a way that was to be typical of him all his life: he kept making changes to his earlier works, he often borrowed music from one composition and put it in another, or used unfinished works in new compositions.
When he returned to St Petersburg (which had by then changed its name to Petrograd) he had piano lessons from a teacher called Anna Espova. She worked hard to discipline him in his playing. He also took conducting lessons from Nikolai Tcherepnin who taught him to like late-Romantic composers such as Scriabin and Debussy. He wrote some music himself in this style, but most of the music he wrote at this time sounded very harsh and dissonant and, although he was becoming quite famous, many people hated it. When he finished his studies at the Conservatoire he won a big prize (the Rubinstein Prize) with his First Piano Concerto, although the examiners had found it hard to agree.
Prokofiev travelled to London where he met many famous people including Diaghilev who had a very skilled ballet group called Ballets Russes. The composer Igor Stravinsky had been writing ballet music for Diaghilev’s dancers. Prokofiev particularly loved Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and it influenced his music. He wrote an opera The Gambler based on the novel by Dostoyevsky but the singers and the orchestra did not understand his music and refused to perform it. One of the first works of Prokofiev to become known all over the world was his First Symphony known as the Classical Symphony. He made the music sound like that of composers from the Classical period such as Haydn. This symphony is still very popular today.
[change] America and Europe (1918-1936)
In 1917 the Russian Revolution took place. The country was in a chaotic state so Prokofiev went to the United States. After a journey which took four months he arrived in New York. At first he had great success there, but he spent a lot of time writing several operas at once, and no opera house wanted to perform them. His ballet The Love for Three Oranges was very popular, but he was short of money so in 1920 he went to Paris where he had some success with his ballet The Tale of the Buffoon. He also wrote his Third Piano Concerto which is one of his best works. Prokofiev lived in Paris for fourteen years, but he often went on tour, performing his works on the piano. In 1928 his Third Symphony was first performed. It is one of his best works, and uses a lot of music from his opera The Fiery Angel which was never performed complete during his lifetime. In 1923 he was invited back to Russia. Although many Soviet people tried to persuade him to stay there he decided to remain in the West where he was starting to have a very successful career. It was not until 1936 that he finally decided to move back to Russia. Life was not easy in the Soviet Union for creative people such as musicians. Composers were made to write music which told about the glories of their country. Any music which the politicians did not like was called “decadent” or “formalist” and got the composer into trouble. Prokofiev had never been interested in politics, and he may have thought that the politicians would leave him alone.
[change] USSR: (1936-1953)
Back in Russia Prokofiev settled in Moscow. He wrote several children’s pieces including Peter and the Wolf. He was asked to write music for two important jubilees: the 20th anniversary of the Revolution and the centenary of Pushkin’s death. He took great care over this music. He set some of Pushkin’s poems to music and wrote a very large piece called Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution, using words by Marx, Lenin and Stalin for a total of 500 performers. The music included realistic effects such as gun shots, machine-gun fire and sirens. However, many critics said that the music was vulgar, and it was not performed until 1966, long after Prokofiev’s death. He tried to write an opera called I am the Son of the Working People but he did not find it a very interesting topic to set to music. The opera was going to be produced by Meyerhold, but Meyerhold was arrested and executed and the opera was dropped.
The World War II was a time of change for Prokofiev for several reasons. In 1941 he had a heart attack which was the beginning of a period of bad health. He spent a lot of time away from Moscow where it was unsafe. He stayed mostly in Georgia and Kazakhstan. His friendship with a young lady called Mira Mendelson led to the break-up of his marriage with Lina. Mira had many political friends in the Communist Party and it is possible that the break-up of his marriage was forced on him. Lina was a foreigner and marriage to foreigners was made illegal (forbidden) at that time. In 1948 she was arrested, charged with being a spy, and sent to a labour camp. Prokofiev lived with Mira for the rest of his life. Soviet writers described her as his wife, but in fact they never married. Lina was freed from the labour camp after Stalin’s death. Later she left the Soviet Union and she died in London in 1989.
During the war Prokofiev composed a lot of his best music. He wrote his most famous piano sonatas as well as working on his great opera War and Peace (based on the novel by Tolstoy) and writing his famous film music for Eistenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and composing his Fifth Symphony. The first performance of this symphony, given on 13 January 1945, was the last time he performed in public. Shortly after he had a bad fall and his health became worse. He spent the rest of his life in a house in the country to the west of Moscow, although during his last winters he lived in Moscow close to his doctors. Even in these last years he was not to find peace. Stalin’s rule of terror had serious effects on all Soviet artists. In 1948 a committee of the Communist Party spoke out against several Soviet composers including Prokofiev. They said that his music was “formalist” and “alien” to the Soviet people. His opera “War and Peace” was not allowed to be performed. The works he wrote in his last years were mostly ones which had been officially commissioned. His best work of this period is the Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra which he wrote for his friend, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.
Prokofiev died of a brain haemorrhage on 5 March 1953. His death was hardly mentioned in the newspapers because the dictator Stalin died on the same day.
