Discovery

About Sergey Prokofiev

As a phenomenal talent born to an affluent family in 1891, the young Sergey Prokofiev grew up aspiring to perpetuate the illustrious Russian musical tradition of Tchaikovsky and of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. Life, however, unfolded rather differently. After enjoying great success as a dynamic piano virtuoso and fresh new composer, Prokofiev left Russia in 1918. He spent the next eighteen years in America and France, soaking in the latest developments in the Western concert tradition, as well as musical currents in jazz, Hollywood, and Broadway.

In 1936, at the most inopportune of times and for reasons still hotly debated, Prokofiev chose to move back to the Soviet Union with his Spanish-born wife and their two young sons. Although he wrote many of his greatest works during his more than two decades back home, he constantly had to juggle artistic mission and political compromise.

Prokofiev excelled in an astonishing range of genres, from piano and chamber music, to symphonies, concertos, ballets, operas, and film scores. A composer with extraordinary melodic gifts, he ultimately demonstrated that innovation in music need not come at the expense of accessibility and that popular art can also be ennobling art. While grappling with political pressures—both musical and practical—he remained profoundly committed to his Christian Science faith.

During Prokofiev’s final years in Stalinist Russia his music was subjected to censorship and repression for ideological reasons. Many works, accordingly, have yet to receive performance in the form he intended them. Knowledge about the music and the man has increased, however, with the establishment of a Prokofiev archive in London and new access to archives in Moscow.