Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Born in the Ukraine, the only child of parents in comfortable circumstances, Sergei Prokofiev studied piano with his mother and showed signs of being a child prodigy. He attended the Conservatory of St. Petersburg, and developed his talents as a pianist. Eventually it was a piano teacher, Anna Esipova, who brought to his work the discipline that composition teachers had been unable to instill. A further influence was a professor of conducting, Nikolai Tcherepnin, who sympathized with Prokofiev's interest in avant-garde experimentation.

Because he is remembered today for compositions that are not especially "modern" - Peter and the Wolf, the Classical Symphony, the Lieutenant Kije Suite, and certain of the concertos - it is easy to forget that Prokofiev passed his early decades as an enfant terrible, writing "ironic, willful, unconventional" music, often as a vehicle for his own use in piano recitals. In his capacity as a touring soloist, he was introduced to the world outside Russia. In London in 1914 he met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned two ballets from him; though the first was not performed by the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev's company, and the second was staged only after World War I, Diaghilev's encouragement was a milestone in Prokofiev's creative life.

The turbulent conditions in Russia in the wake of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution minimized interest in new music there, so Prokofiev, looking for new worlds to conquer, came to the United Stated in 1918, using the long voyage to work on a libretto for a projected opera, The Love for Three Oranges. Following his initial success as a recitalist in New York, the Chicago Opera commissioned the new work; Prokofiev readied it for a 1919 premiere, but the death of the Chicago impresario Cleofonte Campanini forced postponement until 1921, when it was presented under the aegis of the company's new director, Mary Garden. After the premiere, which Prokofiev himself conducted the march tune caught on, but one critic grumbled that most of the music sounded as if a shotgun had been fired at sheets of manuscript paper. The work was not really a success until the Leningrad production, which coincided with Prokofiev's first visit to his homeland since the Revolution.

After his three-month concert tour of the U.S.S.R. in 1927, Prokofiev had another of his operas produced - The Gambler, after Dostoevsky - in Brussels in 1929. Though he took up residence in the U.S.S.R. in 1936 and spent most of the rest of his life there, his countrymen were reluctant to produce his operas. Even when he returned to "socialist realism" or patriotic subjects, he faced ideological criticism, culminating in the denunciation by the Soviet government's Committee on the Arts in 1948, which cited "formalist perversions-alien to the Soviet people" in the works of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and several less illustrious colleagues. Prokofiev, who died on the same day as Stalin, never lived to see himself fully rehabilitated.

In opera and ballet, Prokofiev showed a natural inclination for the stage, for character delineation and dramatic events. In his work, diverse elements appear side by side - innocent lyricism and fierce, mechanized rhythms and dissonances; poetry and irony. When in later years his style achieved a calmer, more humanistic unity, he kept the distinctive profile that makes his music instantly recognizable. Though he was doomed to disappointment as an opera composer during his lifetime, the decades since his death have seen the emergence of his full stature in that capacity.