Sergei Prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev was born in Sontsovka, in the Donetsk region of present-day Ukraine, in April 1891, the only surviving child of a wealthy estate manager. He showed compositional precocity from the age of five, and entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory at thirteen, where his teachers included Rimsky-Korsakov and Liadov for composition and Esipova for piano. He emerged from the Conservatory in 1914 with a reputation as both a percussive modernist composer and a formidable concert pianist.

After the October Revolution he left Russia in 1918 and spent the next eighteen years in the West — first in the United States, then from 1922 in Paris. The output of these years includes the operas *The Love for Three Oranges* (1921) and *The Fiery Angel* (composed 1919–27), the three later symphonies, the ballet *The Prodigal Son* (1929) for Diaghilev, and the third piano concerto. He returned to the Soviet Union permanently in 1936, and the years that followed produced *Peter and the Wolf* (1936), *Romeo and Juliet* (1935–36), *Alexander Nevsky* (1939), the *War Sonatas* for piano, the Fifth Symphony, and the opera *War and Peace*.

He was denounced as a formalist in the 1948 Zhdanov decree and spent his last years partly rehabilitating his reputation. Prokofiev died in Moscow in March 1953, on the same day as Stalin; his death was barely reported. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his operatic, orchestral and chamber work.