Prokofiev left revolutionary Russia then composed War and Peace
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) shocked Saint Petersburg with ferociously dissonant piano music, left Russia after 1917 with official blessing, and came home in 1936 to write Peter and the Wolf and Romeo and Juliet. Hitler's invasion drove him to his most ambitious project, an opera of Tolstoy's War and Peace.
He was born in 1891 on a rural estate at Sontsovka, in today's Ukraine, to an agronomist father and a mother descended from serfs of the Sheremetev family. Maria Prokofieva, who had lost two daughters, devoted herself to music, and hearing her play Chopin and Beethoven in the evenings set her son composing; at five he produced an Indian Gallop, which she wrote down. Reinhold Glière spent the summer of 1902 teaching him at the estate. By 1904 the boy had written several juvenile operas, and Alexander Glazunov urged that he apply to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, which admitted him that year.
Much younger than his classmates, he irritated them by keeping statistics of their mistakes. He studied with Lyadov, Tcherepnin and briefly Rimsky-Korsakov, graduated in composition in 1909 with ordinary marks, and stayed on for piano and conducting. His father's death in 1910 ended his allowance, but his dissonant Etudes won him a platform at a contemporary music series, and a publishing contract followed. In 1914 he took the Conservatory's piano competition, whose prize was a Schroeder grand, by playing his own First Concerto.
Sergei Diaghilev rejected his first ballet as not Russian enough, and that music became the Scythian Suite of 1915. Chout, commissioned in its place, triumphed in Paris in 1921, with Stravinsky and Ravel among the admirers. After the revolution he lived in the United States, Germany and Paris, married the Spanish singer Lina Codina in 1923, and wrote The Love for Three Oranges for Chicago, his only operatic hit in his lifetime.
The Depression shrank Western commissions, and tired of touring, he moved his family back to the Soviet Union in 1936, producing Lieutenant Kijé, Alexander Nevsky, Cinderella and the Fifth Symphony. In 1948 officials condemned him for formalism, yet young performers stood by him: he wrote his Ninth Piano Sonata for Sviatoslav Richter and a Symphony-Concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich.
Source: Sergei Prokofiev
