Sergei Prokofiev

Childhood

Prokofiev was born on a rural estate in Sontsivka, then in Russia but now part of the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Encouraged by his pianist mother, the five-year-old Prokofiev started to write his own music and had written an opera by the age of nine. Two years later his mother arranged for the composer Rheinhold Glière to teach her son the rudiments of composing. Prokofiev’s distinctive musical voice can already be traced in works he wrote following Glière’s guidance – notably his signature unusual rhythmic patterns and cheeky ‘wrong note’ melodies and harmonies.

Young Rebel

In 1904, Prokofiev became the youngest-ever student to enroll at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, the city’s senior music school (he was 13). The student Prokofiev styled himself as a rebel, writing harsh-sounding music that constantly broke established rules. His outstanding abilities as a pianist allowed him to moonlight as a professional, mostly playing radical modern music. His graduation concert won Prokofiev the Anton Rubinstein Prize for piano performance; he had chosen to play a new work of his own, what would come to be known as his Piano Concerto No 1.

Making his Way

In 1914, Prokofiev was in Paris and met Serge Diaghliev, the ballet-master responsible for commissioning some of the most significant music of the early 1900s. Diaghilev immediately ordered music from Prokofiev. The ballet scores he supplied have not enjoyed lasting success but the association with Diaghilev brought the composer to wider attention. When Prokofiev found himself stranded in the Caucuses after the 1917 Russian Revolution, he used his burgeoning reputation to pursue an itinerant career in France, Germany and the US. He lived outside Russia from 1918–34.

Back to the USSR

Prokofiev’s radical, modernist style ultimately proved a dead end. After some notable failures, the composer returned to his central belief that ‘melody is the most important element in music.’ At the same time, he began to consider a move back to now-Soviet Russia, where he believed the sort of simpler, more melodic music he was keen to write would be a good fit with Stalin’s censors. They strictly demanded composers write straightforward works that reflected the experience of the working people.

Controversial Personality

Prokofiev was arrogant, dismissive and largely unbothered by the atrocities committed by the Soviet regime unless they directly affected him (he struggled emotionally when his relationship with Stalin’s censors proved more complicated than he had believed it would). The composer’s treatment of his first wife, Lina, was particularly troubling. He abandoned her and their two sons to pursue an affair with a writer 24 years his junior. Lina, who was Spanish, was then arrested and imprisoned by Soviet police on a baseless spying charge and served eight years in a hard-labour camp. Prokofiev made no meaningful effort to help her.

When Prokofiev was growing up, Russia still entertained ideas of a ‘national’ music drawing on native tunes and myths. At the same time, Tchaikovsky’s ballets and operas, which put individual feeling over national agendas, had become enormously popular. Both shaped Prokofiev, who would become, first and foremost, an outstanding musical storyteller – though he occasionally drew on national stories and tried to conform to Stalin’s ‘socialist realist’ style.

Prokofiev was initially inspired by radical modernists. Stravinsky’s influence is particularly apparent in the composer’s loud and rhythmically-pounding Scythian Suite, which drew on music for Ala i Lolli – a ballet for Diaghilev that was never performed, partly as it was considered to closely resemble Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

Ultimately, Prokofiev came to cherish the ideals he first celebrated in his Symphony No 1 of 1918 – a work underpinned by the Classical style of Mozart and Haydn with music of clean lines, clear and broad melodies, strong rhythms and defined sections. Prokofiev’s musical genius lay in his ability to replant all those things in a musical language that seemed new and highly personal.